Presenting Blume’s Maiden Podcast: X-Unicorns, Or The New Mutants Of Unicorns

What is a unicorn? A mythical creature, known to be proud, untameable, fiercely independent, and difficult to capture.

We recently spoke about the top podcasts of the country in our first publication Narrowcast; now we are attempting to join this league ourselves!

Sometime last year, Karthik Reddy penned down his thoughts on the term ‘Unicorn’. When venture capitalist Aileen Lee first coined the term, the definition was strictly limited to privately-held companies valued at over $1 billion within a decade of their existence. This definition was applicable to only a select few Indian companies such as InMobi and Flipkart. That’s all there was in 2013 that fit this definition. After more than a decade at Blume, it is now becoming clear that India is birthing new variants of this mythical creature and we’re calling them ‘X Unicorns’.

In the series of conversations, we celebrate startups that typically haven’t had rocketship journeys and have sometimes taken longer and rather uncertain paths to get there. When we look at a Carbon Clean or a Dunzo, they don’t look like typical unicorns. Some look like zebras and hippos, others rhinos, gazelles, and seahorses. They look like they could be any shape or size as long as they have spouted a large single horn or even two for effect.

It doesn’t matter what the path to the unicorn is, it doesn’t matter when they go public, it doesn’t matter whether they have a body of a horse or any other creature in the animal kingdom — as long as it reaches there and we want to look back and celebrate the ones that have entered and are soon entering the X-Unicorn club.

In this eight-episode series, we explore stories of grit, resilience, tragedy, personal growth, failures and successes; we celebrate founders who played it by their rules and we hope every entrepreneur who tunes in is able to walk away with learnings that span all facets of the entrepreneurial mindset and journey.

”The age of the X-Unicorns is upon us. Silently, they grow unnoticed and emerge valiantly into the limelight.” – Karthik Reddy