Unicorn (finance)

A unicorn is a start-up company valued at over $1 billion.[1][2][3] Canadian tech unicorns are known as narwhals.[4] A decacorn is a word used for those companies over $10 billion,[5] while hectocorn is the appropriate term for such a company valued over $100 billion. According to VentureBeat, there were 229 unicorns as of January 2016.[6] The largest unicorns included Uber, Xiaomi, Airbnb, Palantir, Snapchat, Dropbox and Pinterest.[7] As of October 2015, Uber was valued by Fortune at US$51 billion.[5][8]

Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark predicted in March 2015 and earlier that the rapid increase in the number of unicorns may presage what he has termed a "risk bubble" that will eventually burst, leaving in its wake what he terms dead unicorns.[8][9][10]

References

  1. ↑ Lee, Aileen (2013). "Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups". TechCrunch. Retrieved 26 December 2015. 39 companies belong to what we call the 'Unicorn Club' (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors)... about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups
  2. ↑ Griffith, Erin & Primack, Dan (2015). "The Age of Unicorns". Fortune.com. Retrieved 26 December 2015. Subtitle: The billion-dollar tech startup was supposed to be the stuff of myth. Now they seem to be... everywhere.
  3. ↑ Chohan, Usman (2016). "It's Hard to Hate a Unicorn, Until it Gores You". The Conversation. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  4. ↑ Truong, Alice (2015). "Canadian Tech Unicorns are Called 'Narwhals'". Quartz online (November 20). Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  5. 1 2 Roberts, Daniel & Nusca, Andrew (2015). "The Unicorn List". Fortune. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
  6. ↑ Koetsier, John (19 January 2016). "There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding and $1.3T valuation". venturebeat.com. VentureBeat. Retrieved 19 January 2016.
  7. ↑ Frier, Sarah & Newcomer, Eric (2015). "The Fuzzy, Insane Math That's Creating So Many Billion-Dollar Tech Companies". Bloomberg. Retrieved 26 December 2015. Subtitle: Startups achieve astronomical valuations in exchange for protecting new investors... Snapchat, the photo-messaging app raising cash at a $15 billion valuation, probably isn't actually worth more than Clorox or Campbell Soup. So where did investors come up with that enormous headline number?
  8. 1 2 Winkler, Rolfe (2015). "Bill Gurley Sees Silicon Valley on a Dangerous Path". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 26 December 2015. Subtitle: Subtitle: Venture capitalist says companies hurt themselves by trying to delay going public(subscription required)
  9. ↑ Blodget, Henry (2008). "Tech: How To Survive Great Depression 2.0 Without Firing Everyone". Business Insider. Retrieved 26 December 2015. It seems every serious venture capital firm has now had a chat with its portfolio companies about how it[']s time to fire people... VC-extraordinaire Bill Gurley's Benchmark has had the same chat with its companies, but Bill tells peHUB that there's actually an alternative to canning half your company: Move to San Jose
  10. ↑ Griffith, Erin (2015). "Bill Gurley Predicts 'Dead Unicorns' in Startup-Land this Year". Fortune. Retrieved 26 December 2015. Subtitle: A crash would affect more than just startups. ... Bill Gurley, the prominent investor behind Uber and Snapchat, has been sounding the tech bubble alarm for months now. He's preached about the dangerous appetite for risk in the market, the alarmingly high burn rates and the excess of capital sloshing around in Silicon Valley. At the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Gurley rang the alarm once again. We may not be in a tech bubble, the venture capitalist said, but we're in a risk bubble.


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