Expensify founder: Please don't call us 'cockroaches'
Unicorn has become the Silicon Valley default for a startup valued at more than a billion dollars. Once mythical, but now a popular milestone for startups, the "unicorns" of Silicon Valley are companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.
On the opposite side of the spectrum are the less glitzy, but nonetheless profit-driven "cockroaches," wrote David Barrett, the founder of Expensify, in a funny post on his company's blog.
The lean, "cockroach" startups are low-burn, but efficient growth companies, Barrett says.
He points to a Paul Graham essay from 2007, which may have coined the term: "Apparently the most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear war are cockroaches, because they're so hard to kill. That's what you want to be as a startup, initially. Instead of a beautiful but fragile flower that needs to have its stem in a plastic tube to support itself, better to be small, ugly, and indestructible."
500 Startups founder, Dave McClure, resurfaced the term in a 2013 Wired article on being a lean "cockroach" startup. (McClure is also attributable for many of Silicon Valley's ridiculous lingo, including the stable of horse-related valuation names like centaur or ponies.)
But, Barrett seems to want to take a page out of McClure's book and come up with a new, more flattering term for a company that prioritizes low-burn.
"Those of us committed to growth AND profit need to band together to come up with a stronger brand than the one that's creeping into the mainstream consciousness," Barrett writes.
His suggestions range from a Redwood that grows through all weathers to Kudzu vines, which invade everywhere.
On Twitter, tech founders are chiming in with their own nicknames too: