I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having a massively more complicated hierarchy of bosses and managers and project leaders and it seems like everybody is chief of something and everybody loses sight of the big picture as they just become focused on a single aspect of a given product. What was once a lean startup with a vision is now struggling to get new products out of the pipeline even though they have ten times (or more) the manpower.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.