But back in 2013, when I first met Chip, Airbnb was still just getting started. Though we had nearly four million guests staying in homes around the world, most people saw us as strictly a technology company. But Joe, Nate, and I knew we had more to offer. We knew that we weren’t just in the business of home sharing. We envisioned a community that helped people with not only where you stay, but what you do—and whom you do it with —while you’re there. In other words, a complete end-to-end trip. What we were actually selling was hospitality.

As of this writing, the world contains 433 “unicorns”—venture-backed companies that boast a market value of $1 billion or more. While these companies get a lot of press, they’re a relatively small part of their respective economies. In early 2020, US-based unicorns had a combined market value of $650 billion. This seems like a big number, but at the time amounted to just slightly more than 2 percent of the combined market value of the S&P 500. While entrepreneurial enclaves like Silicon Valley are important, we need to find ways to turn up the entrepreneurial flame in every organization.

It’s between $1 million and $10 million that the team needs to focus on cash. Growth sucks cash, and since this is the first time the company will make a tenfold jump in size, the demands for cash will soar.

In Gary’s case, volume is detrimental to cash. The more Gary sold, the worse his cash got (his gross margin percentage was 31%, while his working capital percentage was 41%).

It turned out that only about half of the people in our study earned a traditional paycheck as the primary economic mechanism in doing a hedgehog.

We discovered a wide range of methods people in the study used to make their economics work, categorized into 12 economic streams. Over the course of their lives, the people in the study used some combination of between three and eight of these streams, with a median of four streams per person. This analysis showed that there are many ways to make the economics work, and you might need to draw from multiple methods simultaneously and/or across phases of your life.