For the better part of two decades, venture capital was looking for unicorns. The metaphor mattered. Unicorns were rare, mythical, dramatic. They appeared once in a portfolio, justified the rest of it, and disappeared into the canon as the founder of the year. The model behind the metaphor was simple: spread bets thin, hope two carry the rest, accept that the other dozens will fail.
That metaphor produced a particular kind of founder. Young, often male, often technical, often with a single insight pursued with absolute conviction. Lean, fast, able to break things. Built for the sprint to the next round. Optimised for narrative, for momentum, for getting to the next valuation. There were extraordinary companies built by these founders, and there will be more. But the archetype was always narrower than the population of companies that actually create durable value, and narrower still than the population of companies the world now needs.
The next decade calls for a different metaphor. Not a unicorn. A giraffe.
Founders are not short on ambition, creativity or drive. They are short on clarity.
From Michelle Duval, foreword to The Venture Compass, 2025
What the giraffe actually is
A giraffe is not mythical. It is real. It exists in observable populations, on actual savannahs, doing actual work. It is also the tallest land animal on earth, with a range of vision no other species matches. It can see threats coming from kilometres away. It can reach food sources nothing else can reach. It moves at speed when it has to, and stands still when it has to, and has heart musculature evolved for the unusual physiology its height requires.
It is, in other words, an animal that has solved a particular set of physical problems through a particular combination of traits. Tall enough to see and reach. Strong enough to defend itself. Adaptable enough to feed on what others cannot. Resilient enough to keep moving. Aware enough to read its environment. None of these traits is mythical. All of them are observable, evolved, and replicable.
That is the founder archetype the next era of venture needs. Not a mythical creature whose existence is the point. A real, observable, replicable kind of operator who has solved a particular set of business problems through a particular combination of traits.
The four traits of the giraffe founder
Four traits, drawn from observation across the founders MAD has worked with, mentored, advised, and backed over more than four decades.
1. Resilience
Resilience is the capacity to keep operating through the difficult periods every venture has. The pivot that did not work. The hire that did not work out. The capital round that took twice as long as expected. The customer that churned. The personal pressure that compounds when professional pressure is already at maximum.
The unicorn archetype rewarded a different version of this: the founder who refused to acknowledge difficulty, pushed harder, broke through. That version of resilience produced extraordinary outcomes when it worked. It also produced a long catalogue of burnout, breakdown, and damaged founder lives that the public mythology never recorded.
The giraffe version of resilience is different. It is the capacity to absorb difficulty without distortion. To keep building under pressure without becoming someone you do not recognise. To know when to push and when to rest, when to commit and when to reconsider, when to accept the loss and when to keep moving. It is grounded resilience rather than performed resilience. It does not depend on heroic narrative.
It also tends to be the kind of resilience that scales. Founders who burn themselves out at the seed stage do not get to build the company at the growth stage. Founders who carry their teams through difficulty without breaking the people around them are the founders who actually compound across decades.
2. Reach
Reach is the capacity to operate across more than one domain. To understand the technology and the market. To work with the engineers and the customers. To hold a serious conversation in the boardroom and another one on the factory floor. To translate between investors and operators, between regulators and product teams, between the day-to-day and the long arc of the business.
Single-domain founders can build remarkable products. They tend to struggle when those products meet the world. The world does not respect domain boundaries. Customers do not care that you are a technical founder. Regulators do not adjust their requirements because you are a business founder. The companies the world now needs, in food, energy, health, water, waste, sit at the intersection of multiple domains. They require founders who can reach across.
Reach is not the same as breadth without depth. The giraffe founder has a primary capability, a thing they are deeply expert in, plus the ability to extend into adjacent domains as the business requires. Reach is the auxiliary skill that the primary skill cannot replace.
3. Awareness
Awareness is the capacity to read the environment accurately. Not the capacity to predict the future, which no one has. The capacity to see what is actually happening, around the company and inside the company, without distortion.
External awareness reads the market, the regulatory environment, the competitive set, the macro context. It is the founder who saw the rotation coming six months before the consensus did. It is the founder who recognised that the customer they thought was happy was actually quietly evaluating alternatives. It is the founder who registered the regulatory shift in time to position for it.
Internal awareness is harder and more important. It is the capacity to see what is actually happening inside the team, the relationships, the culture, the commercial model. It is the founder who recognised that the head of product was about to leave, that the co-founder relationship was fraying, that the unit economics were drifting in the wrong direction quarter by quarter. The unicorn archetype often had extraordinary external awareness and almost no internal awareness. The giraffe archetype has both.
Awareness is also the precondition for clarity. As Michelle Duval has written, founders are not short on ambition, creativity or drive. They are short on clarity. Clarity comes from awareness, applied with discipline, over time.
4. Practical adaptability
Practical adaptability is the capacity to change without breaking. To adjust the strategy when the strategy is wrong. To revise the plan when the plan is no longer the best plan. To do this without the loss of conviction that some founders interpret as the only alternative.
The unicorn archetype was prone to confusing conviction with rigidity. Hold the position, push through, do not waver. That worked when the original conviction was correct. It produced catastrophic outcomes when the original conviction was wrong, and most original convictions are at least partly wrong, in detail if not in direction.
Practical adaptability holds the underlying mission stable while changing the path to it. It distinguishes between the destination and the route. It treats new information as the input it is rather than as the threat it can feel like. It does not require the founder to abandon the company's identity each time the market evolves. It allows the company to evolve without the founder losing themselves in the process.
Practical adaptability is what survives twenty-year companies. Most companies that exist for twenty years do not look anything like the companies they started as. The product evolved. The market evolved. The team evolved. The capital structure evolved. The thing that stayed constant was the founder's capacity to adapt practically without losing the underlying purpose.
Why the giraffe is the right archetype now
The unicorn archetype was built for a particular kind of business: software-led, capital-light, exit-driven, optimised for the sprint to the next round. That kind of business is not going to disappear. But it is going to be a smaller share of the business population over the next twenty years.
The companies the world now needs operate in physical reality. They have regulatory pathways. They have manufacturing requirements. They scale through deployment of physical assets, not through user acquisition. They have multi-year sales cycles with sophisticated buyers. They are run for decades, not for the typical seven-year fund cycle. They benefit from founders who can stand at full height, see far, reach into multiple domains, absorb difficulty without distortion, and adapt without breaking.
That is the giraffe. The metaphor is not poetic. It is operational.
Failure should not be expected; it should be understood. Success should not be accidental; it should be engineered.
From MAD: What the World Needs Now Is a Little Madness, Mark Falzon, 2025, Chapter 9
What this means for capital
If the founder archetype is changing, the capital that supports them must change too.
Capital designed for unicorn-archetype founders rewards speed, narrative, and round-to-round momentum. It tolerates burnout, churn at senior levels, and distortion of the company in the service of the next valuation. It backs many bets and accepts that most will fail.
Capital designed for giraffe-archetype founders rewards different things. Sustainable pace. Coherent decisions. Founder development as a deliberate practice. Sequencing capital to commercial reality rather than to round timing. Backing fewer companies, deeper, and supporting them through the multi-decade arc that real-economy companies actually require.
That is the kind of capital MAD is built to provide. Structured growth capital that generates income during the life of the deployment. Equity participation that aligns the platform with the company across years rather than across funding rounds. The Venture Compass assessment that tells the founder where they are and what to work on next. The VC Mastermind program that develops the founder through the actual difficulty of scaling. The Ambassador network that compresses the time, risk, and cost of the work.
The era of the unicorn produced extraordinary outcomes for some, and a long tail of damage for many. The era of the giraffe will produce more durable outcomes across a broader population of founders, in the sectors the world now needs. The capital architecture that recognises this will compound. The architecture that keeps looking for unicorns in a savannah of giraffes will be looking in the wrong place.
Read more about the founder development methodology in The Venture Compass, available in our Books library. Founders building real-economy companies in food, energy, health, water, or waste are welcome to apply to the VC Mastermind or to enquire about MAD's growth capital pathway via the For Founders page.
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