This study aims to examine how high-growth firms (HGFs) adapt their strategic communication as they scale and approach major valuation milestones. Specifically, it investigates how ventures’ public value orientations shift as they near the $1-billion valuation threshold (unicorn status), offering new insight into how linguistic changes signal evolving stakeholder strategies in scaling firms.
Drawing from scaling literature, the authors analyze a self-collected data set of 740 LinkedIn posts comprising 49,562 words from seven US-based ventures that achieved unicorn status in 2023. Using computerized text analysis (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and fixed-effects regression modeling, the authors assess changes in prosocial, bureaucratic, self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness to change and conservation language as firms approach their valuation milestone. Mean comparison and ANOVA tests supplement the regression analyses to assess differences across pre-, during- and post-valuation phases.
Results reveal significant linguistic shifts as firms near unicorn status. HGFs decrease prosocial, self-transcendence and conservation language, while increasing bureaucratic, self-enhancement and openness to change expressions. These trends suggest a realignment from communal and mission-driven discourse toward performance-oriented, adaptive communication, signaling legitimacy and scalability to investors and broader markets.
This study focuses on a US-based sample of enterprise technology and healthcare ventures, which may constrain generalizability. However, findings provide a replicable framework for analyzing scaling communication using text analytics and inform future work on linguistic indicators of entrepreneurial evolution, legitimacy and pivoting.
Founders, investors and entrepreneurial marketers can use these insights to anticipate and deliberately manage how value signaling changes as ventures mature. Understanding these communication shifts helps founders balance authenticity and adaptability across stakeholder audiences, enables investors to monitor organizational development through linguistic signals and gives content strategists a framework for channel-specific communication decisions during scale-up.
This study introduces a linguistic lens to scaling research, providing quantitative evidence of how ventures’ public communication shifts as they approach a major valuation milestone. It bridges entrepreneurship and marketing by demonstrating that the language defining a venture’s identity is not static but shifts systematically under scaling pressure, expanding the behavioral foundations of entrepreneurial marketing and scaling theory.
