It's hard to find an example, because no company is stupid enough to push out all the competitors. Instead they push out most of the competitors, while keeping one or two around (so they don't get into trouble with monopoly laws), and building big barriers to entry for anyone else.

Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a big business and making all your profit through volume.

It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same time I think customers usually get a better service for a lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing companies (where overheads work out much larger)

It's not about in unicorns or not. It's about the scope and impact of your projects, both of which have more to do with the size than the PR status of a company. When the quantity of people in a company exceeds the quantity of work, you'll be much more expendable.

Following this type of logic, joining Uber in 2015 or later is a bad idea. Joining airbnb in 2015 is a bad idea. Joining Google now is likely a bad idea. Joining new orgs in AWS is probably a good idea.

A few heuristics that I find useful: 1. Revenue per employee 2. Moving average of number of substantial launches in the past X months 3. Actionable technical blogs that address real challenges directly related to specific business needs. So, no, Uber's why they switched from MySQL to Postgres and then later another article by the same person on why they switched from Postgres to MySQL do not count.

I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate feedback."