EXTRACT

The Cult of the Cockroach

Why unglamorous, resilient companies outlast unicorns.

Forget unicorns. The companies that last look more like cockroaches—unkillable, unglamorous, and always shipping. If you’re building one and want help with narrative, pricing, or routes to revenue, see my consulting.

If you ever want to ruin a VC’s day, walk into the pitch room and proudly declare, “We’re not building a unicorn. We’re building a cockroach.” You’ll see it happen in real time, the air goes thick, someone coughs into their sleeve, maybe a forced laugh bubbles up, maybe someone suddenly remembers a “call” they need to take, because the whole point of their game is chasing mythical beasts, not backing something indestructible and slightly disgusting that they can’t spin into the next Fast Company headline.

Because the thing about cockroaches is that they survive. Not elegantly, not glamorously, and definitely not with a billion-dollar valuation and a profile in Fast Company about how your kombucha subscription service is “disrupting the beverage vertical,” but they survive all the same. I once had an apartment in Amsterdam where the bastards lived inside my telephone answering machine. Every time I pressed play you could hear the click of tiny legs and no amount of spray, bleach, or late-night extermination attempts could wipe them out completely. They just kept coming back.

And when the smoke clears, after the frothy VC darlings have gone up in a fireworks display of burn rate, broken promises, and founders suddenly pivoting to wellness coaching, the cockroaches are still there, heads down, quietly shipping product, selling to customers who actually care, supporting those customers properly, paying rent on time, hiring cautiously, firing rarely, and somehow staying in the game long after the confetti cannons have been swept up and the unicorns have been carted off to the knackers’ yard for dogfood.

Too Weird to Acquire, Too Useful to Kill

You see it all the time if you know where to look. The indie SaaS company with a website that still looks like it was hand-coded in 2009, yet somehow it clears $3 million a year because it solves a problem nobody else even bothered to notice. Or the niche hardware outfit building exactly the widget a weird corner of the industrial supply chain depends on, the sort of product so unglamorous and so specific that nobody else can even be bothered to copy it.

These companies don’t headline conferences. They don’t raise monster Series Bs. They don’t care about their “brand story” or their “media presence.” They just make money, year after year, boring the hell out of anyone looking for drama while delivering the one thing that really matters: survival.

I once knew a business making a product so esoteric, something involving fluid dynamics in lab equipment, that it might as well have been witchcraft. Nobody copied them. Nobody even tried. And yet for more than a decade they turned a steady profit with no outside capital, no debt, just a handful of very satisfied customers and a team who liked building useful things and getting paid for it. They were never going to IPO. They were never going to be acquired. But they were never, ever going away. That’s the cult of the cockroach.

The Anti-Unicorn

Silicon Valley worships velocity. Investors want rockets. Founders want to be astronauts. Everyone is gunning for the moon in vehicles that look spectacular on the launchpad but usually explode before they clear the tower. Half a tank of fuel, no seatbelts, and a chorus of consultants waving them off, it’s a death cult disguised as adventure.

Not everyone wants that ride. Not everyone needs it.

The cockroach company doesn’t raise $20 million to “figure out a business model.” It starts with a business model and figures out how to make it sustainable. It doesn’t chase growth for growth’s sake. It grows as fast as the founders can handle without losing their sanity. It doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, it tries to be indispensable to a few. If you want help pressure-testing models or lining up routes to your first £1–5m in revenue, my consulting work focuses on investor narrative, pricing, pilots, and commercial traction.

And that drives investors insane, because you can’t squeeze a 20x return out of something perfectly happy compounding at 15% a year, spinning off dividends and building quietly. You can’t pitch “total addressable market” when the market is deliberately tiny and completely served. For boards that value discipline over drama, see how I approach governance on Boards.

Not Dead Yet

When the unicorns are collapsing, the cockroach is still shipping. It survives market crashes, investor cold spells, platform changes, algorithm updates, and economic winters. It gets ignored by journalists, laughed out of accelerators, overlooked by analysts, and still it keeps going.

It hires slowly, so layoffs are rare. It spends cautiously, so down rounds never happen. It uses tools that work, not ones that impress. And it’s usually run by founders who know the one truth the startup world tries desperately to hide: success takes time, and more often than not it looks like a decade of grind before anyone notices.

The cockroach keeps grinding. Keeps iterating. Keeps showing up. Because showing up is the entire game.

Punk Persistence

There’s something beautifully punk about the cockroach company. It’s not just DIY—it’s the refusal to conform, the gleeful middle finger to startup orthodoxy, the willingness to say, “We’ll do it our way, even if it’s slower, messier, and definitely not good enough to get us invited to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt.”

The cockroach company is Fugazi as a software house, self-managed, fiercely independent, never selling out, always putting fans before fame. And like Fugazi, it attracts a cult following: customers who genuinely care, employees who don’t leave, founders who don’t flame out. That’s the secret sauce, and it’s worth more than a keynote slot ever will be.

Cockroach Capitalism

And here’s what nobody really wants to hear: most successful companies look a hell of a lot more like cockroaches than unicorns. Not the ones that make headlines, but the ones that make payroll. Not the glamorous disruptors, but the boring suppliers. The companies serving dull industries with dull products, doing it for decades, growing slowly, and quietly becoming too useful to ever kill.

Take WD-40, invented in the 1950s, still on the shelves today. The formula hasn’t changed, the branding hasn’t needed reinvention, and yet hundreds of millions of cans get sold every year. Nobody dreams of working at a lubricant company, but the cockroach doesn’t care, it just keeps crawling.

Or Bunzl, the UK distribution machine. It doesn’t sell dreams, it sells paper cups, cleaning products, and high-vis jackets. It should be terminally boring. Instead, it’s been profitable for seventy years, turning in steady growth while flashier companies died young and messy.

Or Halma, another British stalwart, quietly compounding into a FTSE 100 giant by selling safety sensors, alarms, and healthcare tech. Nobody queues round the block for their launches, yet they’ve built something indestructible, the kind of business that looks dull as dishwater from the outside but is pure gold to anyone who understands resilience.

That’s cockroach capitalism: bolts, boxes, sensors, soap. Scarcity as a feature, not a bug. Reluctant scaling. Relentless focus. And the quiet knowledge that the boring things, the things people always need, will always outlast the hype.

And that’s why companies like these don’t just survive. They become unkillable. Not because they blitzscaled, but precisely because they didn’t.

The Cult You Might Want to Join

So no, cockroach isn’t sexy, but sexy is overrated.

If you want to build something that lasts, something that matters, something that won’t vanish the second capital gets expensive or attention drifts to the next shiny thing, you could do far worse than join the cult. Start with the first chapter, skim the other extracts, or talk to me about consulting or board work.

The cult of the cockroach.

No confetti cannons. No billion-dollar valuations. Just resilience, revenue, and the slow, savage satisfaction of still being here when the others are gone.

Copyright © 2025 Tim Harper. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Born to Disrupt: Entrepreneurship, Rock and Roll, and Surviving the Shitshow.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in reviews or critical articles.