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I wonder how often one of these reasons (especially 1, 2 and 4) has been the impetus for starting a company, and then has been replaced as a motivation by other much stronger reasons. Ie I start a startup because I want to get rich, and in the process I come to care about customers and so focus on delivering them value over the long run.

My guess is that this is reasonably common among small scale successes ($1-10m companies), but has almost never been true for unicorns…

Can you think of any unicorns where the founding team have admitted being primarily motivated by any of these reasons?

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