On Unicorns
.. and the path to a differentiated life.
Hey everyone!
Happy Sunday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. As always, hope you all had a fantastic week. It was a great one on our end, as we finally got a much needed respite from a hectic October travel schedule to spend a little bit more time at home in Dallas.
As such, this week granted a bit more time for in-depth writing, and I used it to tackle a concept that has long been on my mind: a talent evaluation/acquisition model that I’ve come to call ‘The Unicorn Framework’. It is a corollary to a piece I wrote earlier in the month that centered around the concept of Talent Stacks - which deal with the hiring reality of rarely if ever finding the ‘perfect candidate’. This week’s piece takes that question further, challenging it through a different lens: what would it look like to get as close as possible to one?
Hope you enjoy, and as always please send any thoughts my way. Look forward to talking again next week!
- CG
Thinking On - Unicorns
Bears on Unicycles
Let’s start with a thought experiment.
I want you to imagine you are at the world’s greatest circus, an extravagant affair complete with all of the spectacular artistry one might expect from such a show - magicians vying for your attention with their sleights of hands, stilt walkers aimlessly stumbling around, fire eaters making balls of blaze disappear. It is past time for the big show, and after navigating your way through the sprawling fairgrounds you finally settle into your seat at the tent for the main performance.
It starts slowly with the basic acts, easing you and the rest of the audience into the event. Clowns engage spectators with humorous faces while a juggler tosses some clubs around in the air. A balloon artist crafts a ferocious dragon from his materials while a man rides a unicycle around the circular pit. The children ooh and ah, but not you - while your attention may be piqued, you’ve seen these tricks hundreds of times before. They’ll have to do better if they are to truly put you in a state of awe.
Slowly, the show builds to a crescendo. The acts get harder and more complex, more zany and wild. A man rides a motorcycle through a terrifying ring of fire. Performers start swinging from the trapeze bars, coordinating their stunts to create magic in the air. A man flies through the night like a rocket, shot out of a cannon with eyes on a target across the stage. Slowly, but surely, you are shifting to the edge of your sheet.
And then, the grand finale. Out walks a bear - 600 pounds of intimidating fur and sinew, growling ferociously to alert the crowd to his presence. His steps are slow and measured, as if he is building tension and anticipation with each one he takes on his way to center stage. As he reaches the middle and raises up onto his hind legs, the act is ready to begin.
He starts in simple fashion, with a coordinated dance routine consisting of some basic moves - friendly waves to the spectators, a ballerina twirl, a smoothly controlled bow. Impressive, but nothing earth-shattering - that is until he starts to show off. Suddenly the props are out and he’s balancing a ball on his nose, juggling pins in the air to bring the crowd into a frenzy until finally, it is time for his surprise trick.
In the far corner of the ring, the unicyclist re-emerges and rides to meet the bear. After some brief showmanship and goodbyes to the spectators, he returns attention to his furry friend by handing over his prized cycle. The bear grabs it in his paws, taking a moment to survey his new toy. He studies the singular rubber wheel, notices the glisten of the silver spokes that hold it together, and comes to rest his eyes on the jet black leather seat. And then, in but a moment, the laws of physics and biology seem to break. The bear is up on the cycle, balancing his gargantuan form on the tiny bike as he peddles around the arena. He peddles fast and then slow, jumping and spinning as the crowd rises to their feet in awe. Even you, amidst all your skepticism cannot help but follow for a simple reason - finally, after all the mediocre tricks, that is something that you have never witnessed before with your own eyes.
You’ve seen bears, and you’ve seen unicycles. But at no point have you ever seen them together - and after tonight you may never again.
While but a hypothetical (unless you are frequent circus goer, at which point cheers to you), the story of the bear on the unicycle carries a powerful lesson.
At its core it is a story about the power of combination, about how uniqueness and differentiation emerge by way of pairing together distinct skills not normally found together. In isolation, neither the bear nor the unicycle is particularly interesting - you have likely seen each alone hundreds of times before. But put them together and suddenly you have a new phenomenon, an outcome you have never seen. Your attention becomes captivated by the novelty that emerges - because while the bear alone is but a bear, the moment he hops on that unicycle he becomes something else entirely - a unicorn.
Let’s talk about what that means.
Definition
The definition of what a unicorn is will invariably depend on who you talk to.
Take two far opposites, as an example: a young girl and a venture capitalist. To the girl, the unicorn is a creature of magic and wonder; a gentle horse with a glittering horn that lives in an enchanted forest and offers the promise of granting her wildest wishes. In her eyes, the mystical being is an encapsulation of her hopes, her dreams, her imagination.
But the venture capitalist sees it differently, using the word to describe the rare startup that manages to cross the mythical line of a $1 billion dollar valuation. To the VC, a unicorn is less about magic and wonder and more about dollars and cents - a unicorn company represents a story about risk, vision, and the thrill of capturing the next big idea.
Two perspectives, two distinct definitions - one a representation of imagination, the other actuality. Because like all words ‘unicorn’ carries with it an air of context dependence, such that different locations will equate to different meanings. But regardless of their flexibility, words must have roots - core concepts that underly them, ideas that speak to the essence of their meaning. And in the case of unicorn, that foundational idea is about one thing alone - whether used in reference to horses or companies, athletes or employees. Rarity. It is a word that represents the scarce, one we use as an attempt to label the things rarely if ever seen. And as such it is a perfect encapsulation of the ephemeral, borderline magical wonders of the earth that make us pause in a sense of awe to say “wow, now that is something truly special.”
And while it carries great power as a word, there are implications waiting to be unlocked if we choose to convert it from label to framework. Because when used as a cognitive model through which to parse the world, the unicorn concept comes to serve as a mechanism through which to both identify and capture that which is truly unique - the outlier people, outlier places, and outlier things that drive the creation of inordinate amounts of value, and push the world forward in the process.
In regards to mental models, the great investor Charlie Munger was fond of saying that they must exist together in a ‘latticework’ - meaning they should be interconnected and tied together, each hanging off the other to create a connected structure by which you can move from one to the next. In the case of the Unicorn model, we can say the clothesline from which it hangs is that of Talent Stacks, which I wrote about earlier this month and described as the following:
Rather than focusing solely on individual skills, Talent Stacks emphasize the combination of various complementary abilities, character traits, and experiences that blend together in order to create a unique and valuable person. They resist the urge to treat skills in a check-box, “you have it or you don’t” type manner and instead recognize that skills exist on a gradient - meaning you can have differing levels of ‘proficiency’ depending on the area.
But they do not only look at skills in isolation - instead, they also look across the full combination of those skills to understand how those traits interact and overlap to create the entirety of the skillset…… [so rather] than trying to find the perfect peg for the hole in the board [Talent Stacks] give us more flexibility throughout the hiring process by acknowledging that we are not only hiring a person but also a complementary set of skills.
Talent Stacks are a great model for helping us look at the full skillset of an individual, but there is a hidden blind spot: they make no consideration of how hard specific skills are to find in combination together in the first place. This is an important recognition to make from my perspective because it accounts for one of the biggest oversights of talent evaluation - namely, that underlying traits are very rarely independent of each other. Humans have a tendency to think of skills as isolated cases, but the reality is that skills frequently carry ‘correlations’ between them - attachments that mean we are more likely to find certain skills paired together than others, like ingredients that complement each other in a recipe. When viewed through the lens of talent stacks, the natural implication is that a sort of ‘rarity’ scale emerges - certain stacks will carry a higher frequency rate in the world, while others will be harder to find.
In the grand schemes of talent evaluation and development, a failure to recognize the interconnectedness of traits leaves us short-sided, lacking the necessary level of appreciation for skill packages that are hard to find. And that can cause us to miss out on powerful opportunities to upgrade our companies, or even ourselves.
Recognizing the unique when it is in front of us requires an understanding of what unique means in the first place - and that is exactly what the Unicorn model helps us solve for. By taking a microscopic lens to the concept of Talent Stacks, the search for Unicorns challenges us to think in terms of frequencies and to ask the question “how likely is Skill A to be found with Skill B in the first place?”. When we answer that question first, we are then able to set a base-case expectation for a specific combination of talents, and thus gain a more appropriate level of respect for sets of traits that are rare to exist tied together. The result is that when we finally do find a unicorn, we are much less likely to overlook it because we are able to appreciate it in all of its glory.
Baseball’s Unicorn Amongst Unicorns
Let’s look at an example to help contextualize this, from the domain I know best: baseball.
Most, if not all of you, are familiar with the concept of the “5 Tool Player” from the traditional scouting perspective - the term used to describe the rare player that possesses each of baseball’s most important skills: hitting for average, hitting for power, running, fielding, and throwing. Traditionally, most players are strong in a few areas while showing weaknesses in others - like the big first baseman that can hit for both average and power but who may lose a foot race to a snail. The “5 Tool Player”, however, redefines expectations, creating a near mythical blend of baseball’s five talents in but a single athlete. The result is a player capable of impacting the game in nearly any scenario, in turn offering the team that employs them a unique competitive advantage because of their ability to perform at an elite level across multiple dimensions.
With respect to our current topic, the “5 Tool Player” is baseball’s ultimate version of a unicorn. And now, in the middle of a highly touted World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, is no better time to study some of these unicorns in their natural habitats. From Aaron Judge to Freddie Freeman, Juan Soto to Mookie Betts, this series is packed with unique stars that stand head and shoulders above the rest.
And yet, for all the star power on display in the Fall Classic, there is one that separates himself from the others: Shohei Ohtani. Even amidst all of baseball’s history, there has been perhaps no better encapsulation of the unicorn phenomenon on the diamond than the Dodger’s Japanese superstar. Let’s look at why.
Using MLB’s public tracking data (via Baseball Savant), we can put some objective context around Shohei’s uniqueness. To do so, let’s consider a few key metrics that more or less approximate his tools, primarily as an offensive player:
Whiff% (Hitting for Average): A measure of how much contact a player makes (and thus a decent proxy for ‘hitting for average)
Avg Exit Velocity (Hitting for Power): A measure of how hard a player hits the ball on average
Sprint Speed (Running): A measure of a player’s top-end speed when running all out
Arm Strength (Throwing): The average velocity for a defender’s competitive throws
Starting with Whiff%, Ohtani comes in with a value of 29.8% - meaning that he makes contact with the baseball on around 70% of his swings. While solid, there is nothing spectacular here as 162 different players (with a minimum of 400 plate appearances in 2024) showcased a lower Whiff% rate this season. Speed is a similar story for him, too, as his 28.1 m/s average sprint puts him in the 70th percentile for the league - a number that 169 different players topped this past year. Up to this point, nothing that looks like an incredible outlier. Yet things get interesting when we start to layer in both his power and throwing abilities, as his average exit velocity of 95.8 mph comes in at 2rd best in the league while (using his pitching FB velocity as a proxy) his 97 mph arm strength ranks as 5th best. So, what we are ultimately left with is two above average skills (contact & spring speed) and two elite ones (power and throwing).
But remember, unicorns are about combination - the resulting stack you get when you put all of these things together, and how unique that stack is when compared to all the others. And in the case of Shohei this where the true separation lies, through the lens of the following question: how many MLB players have a whiff rate less than 29.8%, an average exit velocity of higher than 95.8 mph, a sprint speed faster than 28.1 m/s, and an arm strength of stronger than 97 mph? If you’ve been following along, you can guess the answer - zero. When all the pieces are put together, he stands on an island by himself - a true unicorn amongst an already elite group of athletes. He is one of a kind, an outlier amongst outliers and the only player in MLB history to accomplish the feat of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season. And all of that comes before you consider the fact that, when healthy, he pitches too. Unicorn, squared.
And so, within the frame of baseball alone, Shohei serves as a perfect encapsulation of the power of combining highly-indexed skills rarely found in combination with each other. But the unicorn phenomenon extends far beyond the realm of just sports, serving as an equally representative nomer for business founders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as it does for athletes like Ohtani and Patrick Mahomes.
Unicorns can be found anywhere and everywhere, so long as we know what we are looking for. And with that comes some powerful implications for both building companies and developing yourself as an individual.
Implications - Teams
With the above in mind, let’s talk about unicorns from the standpoint of hiring and building a team.
Like the 5 Tool Player in baseball, the unicorn employee - regardless of industry - is the most powerful type of person that you can add to your operation. They are the ‘impact players’ of your organization, the ones capable of taking on and solving a variety of problems across a broad scope of asks. The unicorn is the rare candidate that brings to bear a variety of unique but complimentary skills, talents that you may find separately in two different people but rarely combined within one - like a programmer who is exceptional with both backend data structuring and UX/visual design, or a baseball coach with both a robust understanding of analytical information and the ability to communicate it effectively to a player.
Depending on your domain, the general construct of a unicorn will look slightly different. The first step is to understand what those unique skill profiles are in your industry by outlining a wide bucket of traits and then determining the relative strength of correlation between them. Once you’ve done so it is time to go on the hunt - to find the people that seem to defy the normal pattern of talent stacks, those that stand out from the rest as a function of their unique blend of skills. And if you are fortunate enough to find one - that golden, mystical unicorn - the goal becomes singular: capture it at all costs.
Why? Because adding a unicorn to your team is the equivalent of taking a ‘hiring shortcut’. One of the great challenges of team building is that we are naturally limited by headcount - whether we are looking at a sports roster or an org chart, there is always an upward bound on the amount of people we can marshal towards any given problem at one time. Unicorns are the ultimate solution to this paradox - the more diversified and counterintuitive the skillset, the greater the likelihood they will be capable of finding solutions to the endlessly vast array of problems your team is likely to face. Rather than needing to find answers to questions via multiplicity, unicorns instead allow you to solve them via singularity. One person, many possibilities.
A powerful implication of unicorn skillsets is that they can be a leading indicator for impact to come down the road. CEOs and elite athletes alike teach us this lesson clearly - when we strip down their successes to the traits that underly them as in the Ohtani example, it seems all but inevitable that they would have wound up where they ultimately have. The unicorn model allows us to accelerate this identification process - rather than focusing on what a person has done (which is naturally limited when someone is first starting out in their career), it instead allows us to strip them down the traits that project what they will do. And that, in the grand scheme of talent evaluation and acquisition is a massive difference.
As such, the earlier you can identify unicorns the better - primarily because doing so allows you to benefit from all of the impact that they will have, but even more-so because unicorns are ultimately the ones that come to command the greatest premiums down the road. The earlier you can find them, the cheaper the price the price at which you can acquire them.
But ultimately, when matters much less than if. Beggars can’t be choosers, and in the case of the unicorn you have to take your shots to get them whenever they come. So again, if you are fortunate enough to find one - please do whatever it takes to capture it. I promise, you’ll thank me later.
Implications - Individuals
Now, up to this point we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about both what a unicorn is and how to find one. But there is an important backdrop that has been missing: namely, how do you as an individual become one yourself? Let’s wind down by providing some answers to this question.
A key realization here is that unicorns are not born so much as they are made. They are not people that have been graced by the hands of the gods, pre-ordained with unique talents that destine them for greatness. Even in the case of someone like Ohtani, we often undersell how much targeted effort goes into crafting what we ultimately come to recognize as an outlier skillset. I personally ascribe to the belief that anyone can make themselves a unicorn with the right roadmap properly executed. Doing so certainly takes time and dedication, but the path is there for any who choose to walk it.
Yet there are hurdles along the way, as unicorns are scarce for a reason. The overarching challenge to living life as a unicorn is the following: the journey to differentiation necessitates a willingness to become comfortable being uncomfortable. It is a path few are willing to walk, but the hard truth is that there is no other option. To become a unicorn one must be willing to step outside their comfort zone and areas of expertise, to go on a search for skills that do not come naturally as a function of personality or experience. You must be willing to take a hard look in the mirror and deal with the reality of what you see.
In the case that you are, let me posit a method through which to get started. Start by assessing the skills that you already have in place, the things you might commonly identify as your ‘strengths’. Once you have, ask the following questions: for any strength you possess, what is the counterbalancing, outlier skill on the opposite side of the equation? What is the complementary talent to your strength that is rarely found in combination with it?
More often than not, the path to differentiation lies through the answers that emerge to these questions. The easy part of becoming a unicorn means leaning into the things that already make you you - but the other, much harder part requires doing the work to add orthogonal skills to those that already exist. In doing so, you open up the opportunity to set yourself apart by living at the intersection of skills rather than any one alone, an important recipe for success in an era where it is becoming increasingly difficult to be #1 in the world at any given thing.
If you excel at softer skills like communication or empathy, learn how to augment those with harder skills like data analysis or programming. The same applies in reverse - if you are an outlier in your ability to perform technical analysis, recognize the value you can create by adding softer skills like storytelling to you stack of talents. Put simply: embrace opposites, lean into paradoxes. Make yourself scarce - and thus valuable - by becoming a 1 of 1, creating a non-traditional combination of skills that makes people stop and say “wow, I’ve never seen those two skills together in the same person”.
I can promise you that the benefits of doing so are endless. To become a unicorn means opening yourself up to a world of possibilities, as the more skills you can combine in one domain the likelier you will be to have success in others. Problems will fall apart in front of you, and doors will open that you never possibly imagined. Because at the end of the day, people are endlessly fascinated by outliers, and for good reason - they are the people that drive the world forward, the ones that accomplish the things we priorly thought to be impossible.
See, life is often more of a fairy tale than we like to believe and in this one, unicorns do exist. And yet while everyone wants a glimpse of that magic, few realize they are capable of it themselves - if only they have the courage to pursue it.
