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This chapter is excerpted from 'Unleashing the Startup Unicorn'. For a high-tech start-up, usually there is no shortage of advice available to help them, but too often the individual subjects are treated in isolation without a means of drawing the whole picture together from the point of view of all stakeholders - especially the investors. This book attempts to fill that gap. It is well known that high-tech start-ups need to innovate to survive, yet the failure rate for innovation is shockingly high. Nearly three out of four new products or services, that is, their start-ups miss their revenue and profit goals - or fail entirely. It is a misconception that high-tech start-ups fail only because of the failing products or finances - the failures could also be because of erroneous choice of technology platforms, development teams or methodology or even the project execution. Accordingly, this book takes a holistic view of a start-up's aesthetics that enables it to become attractive to all stakeholders especially investors in all aspects of its operations at all stages of its lifecycle (seed, first, second, and third round funding and so on till attaining unicorn status or exit). Above all, the shockingly low number of unicorns per year (ie, start-ups whose valuation exceed USD1 billion within a timeframe of three to five years) - which is typically less than 0.001 percent - underlines the significance of all and sundry factors contributing to the outstanding success of the venture. In light of these numbers, it can be safely assumed that even veterans in the start-up industry may not have lived through the lifecycle of more than a couple of successful start-ups. The reality of the exceedingly low number of unicorns emerging worldwide every year suggests two main consequences. First, most of the critical aspects of a unicorn are not really enabling imperatives but more in the nature of operational and organizational constraints imposed on the entrepreneurial spirit of the unicorn. Spread across the whole of the book are several examples of such constraints like ambidextrous innovative entrepreneurship, network organization, management by teams, talent management, role-based rather than function-based responsibilities and so on. Second, since no two unicorns are ever similar in any way, the limited range of time period implies that in the absence of prior relevant anecdotal or referential experiences or best practices directly applicable to the critical factors or dimensions of a start-up's organization or operations in the real world, adoption of a preconceived theoretical (and untested) contextual framework is inevitable - which is also reflected in the approach of this book. No amount of case studies can truly fulfil these inevitable gaps that have to be confronted by every unicorn afresh. To succinctly cover all aspects of a contemporary start-up, this book has been organized to reflect the natural grouping of competencies that are essential for entrepreneurial ventures, from conception to attainment of unicorn status or successful exit. To understand and analyze these competencies, the book uses an extended 9S model inspired by the pioneering McKinsey 7S model.