Memes are the next Unicorns

It sounds ridiculous to say, but the next billion-dollar startups will begin as memes.

We think of unicorns as the epitome of seriousness: carefully polished pitch decks, meticulously planned roadmaps, bulletproof business models. Memes, by contrast, seem frivolous – midnight doodles created for laughs rather than VC boardrooms.

Memes aren't turning into companies directly. But they're the spark that lights the flame. They're electric, fleeting, yet culturally potent. A meme captures attention – precisely what most products fail to do.

As AI drives the cost of building products to nearly zero, the battle moves elsewhere. It's no longer about creating something useful; it's about making something visible. In this world, engineering brilliance alone won't guarantee success – storytelling will. It's less about coding and more about connection. The meme becomes a metaphor for capturing attention – the first step in building anything big.

Memes as Signals

Of course, memes aren't blueprints for products. They're something subtler. Memes are signals – footprints in the sand that tell you people care about an idea. They show you what's alive in the culture at a given moment.

And behind almost every meme is someone who felt something first: a creator.

Creators don't chase trends; they set them. They sense a subtle shift – an emotion or insight – wrap it in humor or authenticity, and broadcast it in a language everyone understands. Sometimes it resonates widely, and a meme is born. Other times, it grows into something bigger – something like a product.

Take the Gas app, created by Nikita Bier. Before it was the number one app in the App Store, Gas was a feeling first: the universal teenage desire to be noticed. Bier didn't begin with wireframes; he began with emotion. He spoke Gen Z's language fluently, long before writing a line of code. [1]

The vibe came first; the product followed naturally.

Why This Matters Now

This wouldn't matter if building was still hard. But it isn't – not anymore.

You can launch a usable product in a weekend. You can draw a UI in Cursor, connect workflows in Zapier, and ship polished copy straight from GPT-4. Engineering, design, and operational complexity – the bottlenecks of decades past – have dissolved.

That means something else has become scarce: attention.

Distribution isn't something to worry about later. It's something you build into your idea from the start. And the seed of that idea isn't your MVP. It's the cultural wave your MVP rides.

Creators as the New Builders

Creators used to come in at the end. You built the product, then you handed it off to someone with an audience.

Now it's the other way around. The audience comes first.

The best creators aren't following trends. They're noticing small things other people haven't noticed yet – a shift in tone, a new kind of behavior – and naming it. Not formally, but in the way that works online: through a meme, a phrase, a mood. If it resonates, it spreads. And if it spreads, there's probably something underneath it.

Sometimes it's just a meme. But sometimes it's the beginning of a company.

You can see it in Hailey Bieber's Rhode. It didn't start with a product spec. It started with her. The brand was just a continuation of her taste. It made $212 million in sales and was acquired for a billion dollars. [2] That kind of outcome doesn't happen because the ingredients were better. It happens because people already believed in her.

And Nikita Bier. He's done it twice now – first with tbh, then with Gas. Both apps looked trivial on the surface. But they each captured a feeling: the quiet desire to be seen. They weren't technical breakthroughs. They just felt right. And that was enough.

When you think about it that way, it's not surprising that these apps worked. What's surprising is how long we've underestimated that kind of intuition.

Creators don't just amplify these patterns; they originate them. They have become cultural infrastructure – more agile, insightful, and influential than traditional companies ever could be.

In an AI-enabled world where creation itself is a commodity, what remains scarce is the ability to engage an audience. The new kingmakers won't be the ones who engineer the best product – they'll be the ones who capture attention most powerfully.

Founders as Creators (or Their Earliest Allies)

In this environment, founders have two clear paths: either become creators themselves or partner deeply with creators from the outset – not after launch, not after traction, but from the very start.

Because if nobody sees your product, how good it is doesn't matter. And if everyone has access to the same tools, your competitive advantage won't come from better code – it'll come from deeper connections with your audience.

Smart founders understand this. They test ideas openly, share publicly, and provoke engagement before writing the first line of code. Others form early alliances with creators who naturally speak their audience's language – not to sell, but to truly communicate.

Either way, the creator's role isn't downstream marketing. It's the starting point – the very foundation.

What the Best Founders Already Know

The greatest founders today behave like creators, not because they crave personal attention, but because they understand something critical: attention is the new frontier. It's where the competitive edge lies.

Products alone don't go viral – people do. Products are just carried along.

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Footnotes

[1] Nikita Bier co-founded tbh, an anonymous social app for teens, which was acquired by Facebook for approximately $30 million just nine weeks after its launch in 2017. He later developed Gas, a similar app that became the top-ranked app on the App Store in October 2022, surpassing TikTok and BeReal. Gas amassed over 5 million downloads before being acquired by Discord in January 2023.

[2] Hailey Bieber launched Rhode in 2022, focusing on minimalist skincare products. By March 2025, Rhode achieved $212 million in net sales. In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty acquired Rhode in a deal valued at up to $1 billion, with Bieber continuing as Chief Creative Officer and Head of Innovation.