Many startups seem to aim for this, naturally it's difficult to put actual numbers to this, and I'm sure many pursue multiple aims in the hope one of them sticks. Since unicorns are really just describing private valuation, really it's the same as saying many aim to get stupendously wealthy. Can't put a number on that, but you can at least see it's a hope for many, though "goal" is probably making it seem like they've got actually achievable plans for it... That, at least, I'm not so convinced of.

Startups are, however, atypical from new businesses, ergo the unicorn myth, meaning we see many attempts to follow such a path that likely stands in the way of many new businesses from actually achieving the more real goals of, well, being a business, succeeding in their venture to produce whatever it is and reach their customers.

I describe it as a unicorn "myth" as it very much behaves in such a way, and is misinterpreted similarly to many myths we tell ourselves. Unicorns are rare and successful because they had the right mixture of novel business and the security of investment or buyouts. Startups purportedly are about new ways of doing business, however the reality is only a handful really explore such (e.g. if it's SaaS, it's probably not a startup), meaning the others are just regular businesses with known paths ahead (including, of course, following in the footsteps of prior startups, which really is self-refuting).

With that in mind, many of the "real" unicorns are realistically just highly valued new businesses (that got lucky and had fallbacks), as they are often not actually developing new approaches to business, whereas the mythical unicorns that startups want to be are half-baked ideas of how they'll achieve that valuation and wealth without much idea of how they do business (or that it can be fluid, matching their nebulous conception of it), just that "it'll come", especially with "growth".

There is no nominative determinism, and all that, so businesses may call themselves startups all they like, but if they follow the patterns of startups without the massive safety nets of support and circumstance many of the real unicorns had, then a failure to develop out the business proper means they do indeed suffer themselves by not appreciating 5000 paying customers and instead aim for "world domination", as it were, or acquisition (which they typically don't "survive" from, as an actual business venture). The studies have shown this really does contribute to the failure rate and instability of so-called startups, effectively due to not cutting it as businesses, far above the expected norm of new businesses...

So that pet peeve really is indicative of a much more profound issue that, indeed, seems to be a bit of an echo chamber blind spot with HN.

After all, if it ought to have worked all the time, reality would look very different from today. Just saying how many don't become unicorns (let alone the failure rate) doesn't address the dissonance from then concluding "but this time will be different". It also doesn't address the idea that you don't need to become a "unicorn", and maybe shouldn't want to either... but that's a line of thinking counter to the echo chamber, so I won't belabour it here.