These are the questions you should be asking at a late-stage startup.

When a company goes public or when a company is acquired for a lot of money, the market is looking at how much revenue that company is making and is that revenue growing. I would say that, you know, for example, if I'm at a company right now that's making 50 to 100 million in revenue or more, that's a unicorn. Like, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's reasonable that it's a unicorn if they have 100 million plus in revenue. Okay, that's that pencils out, right?

Yeah, that's pretty good. I think that if I'm working at a company that's like 50 million or less in revenue, and it's a unicorn, now I'm starting to ask myself the question: do users like the product? What's retention look like? Are we charging as much as we could? Could we charge more? Do we actually have product-market fit?

Do we actually have product-market fit? Again, not likely to be a popular question in management if you ask management this, but yeah, worth considering. I think a lot of these questions can really be answered by looking at what are the customers doing. Right? If you're an employee inside of a company, most likely the information you need to tell whether the company's doing well or not is literally available to you.