Startup founder creates easily digestible guide to building unicorn companies
Saturday, 7 March 2026
Australian Wenee (said “Winnie”) Yap is one of those rare people who has written a book about entrepreneurship that can be understood by everyday people.
Yes, her book Riding the Unicorn is about unicorn companies, rather than magical ponies with horns sticking out of their foreheads. And there’s a bit of “bootstrap” “double-sided marketplace” and “gross merchandise value” action within its pages. But it’s all helpfully explained in a glossary at the back of the book.
It could be this way because while Yap has lots of experience in the startup world, she’s done much more than just start companies in her 40 years on the planet. Born in Malaysia, she moved to Australia as a child, and while studying law at university, established Survive Law, Australia’s largest online community of law students. She’s also started a number of other ventures including Catmosphere, Sydney’s first cat cafe, and held senior marketing roles. To round out her CV, she’s also trained and participated in the Sydney to Hobart Race and is a sumo champion.
Yap wrote her book with her husband, Thomas Derricott, after deciding a book for wannabe Australian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, written from the perspective of her own experiences and those of some 20 other startups that have made waves in this part of the world would be helpful.
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It would also ditch the tech-bro machismo.
“All we ever hear is how Elon wants to take us to Mars, and I just didn’t think that was really that relevant for building a business here,” she tells The Post. What would be relevant is a local, diverse cohort: “all of the founders in the book represent different demographics… including a range of female founders with huge financial credibility,” she says.
One of those featured is New Zealand’s own McCarthyFinch, which built pioneering AI that helped automate low-value and time-intensive manual legal processes like drafting contracts and redlining documents. The company, which grew and was sold in one of the quickest such legal-tech exits ever, was co-founded by Nick Whitehouse and Jean Yang after being spun out of MinterEllisonRuddWatts.
Female founders
As a female founder, Yap is a champion of others, and frequently cites Boston Consulting Group studies that have found organisations with a higher percentage of women in leadership roles outperform male-dominated companies, even while they get a tiny fraction of the financial backing. In New Zealand, female led startups get about 2.9% of all startup capital on offer, according to findings from the University of Auckland’s Gender Investment Gap (GIG) research.
On the eve of International Women’s Day, it seems apposite to mention that figure has changed little over the years, and if anything, feminist rhetoric about equal access and opportunity has become even less popular. Yap says sentiment in the startup world reflects the wider world, where the pendulum has swung away from overt proclamations of female empowerment.
“Ten years ago, you weren't going to roll your eyes at ‘female founders’; the words ‘girl boss’ weren’t considered cringe, but empowering,” she says.
“But nothing is static, everything is fluid.”
Overall, the entrepreneur says, the generational arc is towards things getting better for female founders and her own experience illustrates that.
“About 15 years ago my husband Thomas and I walked into a boardroom and did a pitch. During it, the men at the table constantly looked at Thomas for answers, which surprised him as it had been my idea,” she says.
“Now I don't ever feel like I need the sponsorship of a powerful male in the room; things have changed. Am I saying it's easy for everyone? No, I am not.
“But if you think about Boomer and Gen X women and the fact they needed to be twice as good as the average man to succeed, what I’ve found as an older millennial is that you don’t need to that extra level of good to be heard, you can simply be ‘as good’ as the man next to you. You may or may not be chosen, but you won’t be discounted because you’re a woman, and that is progress.”
AI native workforce
Yap’s her latest venture is perhaps her most ambitious to date: She’s the owner of a company called 43 Degrees Below.The company’s work involves consulting to lawyers to teach them how to delegate tasks to AI, “without delegating responsibility”.
“The problem is that we’re at a dangerous point… if we don’t pull the right policy levels as a society, jobs will be lost, because commercial pressures will cause companies to relinquish people, as they already have. It is not theoretical.”
Yap says there is a need for companies to slow down and think carefully about they will use AI, and she says after working with them, they say have a better perspective on AI tools and less of an inclination to use them to replace people.
“They end up wanting to figure out how to have an AI native workforce,” she says. “One of the dumbest things about AI right now is that we keep trying to use it to replace creative tasks, but humans like creative tasks… what we instead need AI do to is stuff we don’t want to do, like typing up transcripts.'
Yap will be speaking at the “Reimagining the Legal Workforce” panel discussion at LawFest, happening in Auckland this week.