For startups, 2009 was a good year. More than 20 companies launched at that time, including Uber, Slack, Pinterest, and Blue Apron, eventually achieved $1 billion-plus valuations. Given that those companies were all venture-financed and emerged from Silicon Valley, you might assume that the key ingredients that have ensured their success were cutting-edge technologies, digital platforms, and customer bases that were chiefly made up of digital natives. You would be wrong.
Yes, those companies had great technologies, platforms, and demographics, but the secret of their success turns out to be much more prosaic. Each was able to satisfy real customers who needed real jobs done — and by jobs, I mean a fundamental problem in a given situation that needed a solution. In other words, they had great business models.