Unichicken

Unichicken

What the duck's a unichicken?!

Well, glad you asked. This cute and comical piece of artwork has a serious message.

Let's start with the chicken. Startups are like factory farmed chickens: we force feed them with<br>investment capital so they can grow plump and juicy until the moment of liquidation,<br>at which point the financial value is pulled out of them and we're left with a dysfunctional<br>carcass of a company.

Then there's the unicorn. The whole idea with these startup chickens is that we're supposed to turn<br>them into unicorns. In reality, however, 90% of unicorns are bleeding cash and never reach profitability.<br>What's more, "unicorn" is actually a fancy way of saying "pension fund subsidised monopoly<br>forming"—which has a number of detrimental effects on the economy. In the United States, ~65% of<br>investment into Venture Capital funds comes from pension funds. So these cash-bleeding companies are<br>spending the retirement money of taxpayers. Plus, it's very difficult for companies that rely on<br>customer revenue to compete with (aspirant) "unicorns", which can endlessly bleed cash and still survive<br>on the market. This deforms entire industries, causing them to evolve illogically and incorrectly.

Unichicken questions both the hyper-growth model of startup incubation as well as our endless<br>pursuit of unicorns.

The unichicken design is Creative Commons! Download and use it for your own t-shirts, stickers,<br>and other merch.

Find out more about non-extractive finance, Post Growth Entrepreneurship, and how business can be<br>reframed as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression.