Ask HN: How did you land an early job at a future Unicorn?

My first co-op in 2016 was 6 months at Desktop Metal. They're worth at least $1.5B (Forbes article from 2019). I got the co-op through school--Northeastern has a well established co-op program and they have lots of connections to companies looking to hire college students. I'm pretty sure I found it through the school's own career planning tool. When I joined they had only been in business for around a year and half but were already doing very well in the metal additive manufacturing space.

early is going to depend on what you mean by early, but first means you either know the founder(s) or you know a friend of the founder(s). Generally you will have worked with them in the past.

My last one we weren't a unicorn (though did aspire to be :)) and I think we were a year or so in before anyone was hired that there wasn't an existing connection to.