The Speed of a Unicorn | Hacker News Reader

The Speed of a Unicorn

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61 pointsramadis33 comments

This list is quite confusing.

What defines "start-up"?

Take go-pro, they're a product company that had huge success with a hit product. They successfully re-invested to keep that product business successful and the business grew to 1bn.

Does unicorn just mean non-publically traded company worth > 1bn?

This.

How is it that Avast is still a "startup" when it was founded in 1988?

I mean.. they were founded even before the dot com bubble!

Edit: I know there's always a problem when trying to define what is and isn't a startup...but by all metrics I could think, Avast isn't one of them. I mean, otherwise we would also need to include the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon as other unicorn startups, no?

A unicorn is a company that has reached 1bn valuation while staying private. So Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Amazon don't qualify (while Google definitely was one for some time, it's just that the term didn't exist back then). Of course it also puts PwC and Bechtel in this league...

I really like Paul Graham's definition. A newly founded company designed to grow very fast

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Yes, that's the definition of unicorn. There's companies like Avast on here because they stayed private for a long time before hitting the gas and getting to that.

Because of the way the equity markets have been recently, there's not a clear path to becoming a unicorn without hitting most of the other markets we tend to think of as startup-y: VC-backed, high growth, scalable into a big market.

If that is the case, there are a few dozen "unicorns" that never had a "hit the gas" period and just grew slowly into billion-dollar companies over decades. I don't see any reason that is not a clear and viable path today, if you have the patience.

I guess in a world where jet.com and Slack exist, it's easy to see many of these as "slow" growth. Avast has been 56% annualized growth over 2008-2014. Getting these valuations typically takes high $X0mil revenue or more, meaning most of them over a 7 year period of annualizing their growth at 50%+. 50%+ growth is pretty impressive, and I don't think there are many people who would think of that as "slow" or "patient".

Not sure you understood me. I'm talking about the hundreds of billion-dollar private companies that aren't on the list referenced here.

Also, while Avast grew into a billion-dollar company via a very rapid growth spurt it took them 20 years to get to the start of that spurt.

For me a startup is a company that is still in "validation" mode for their main business line.

Either validate: - innovative business model

- product

- market

- ...

It usually boils down to businesses that still didn't find a repeatable growth channel (that scales).

Crazy thought: If there's so many billion dollar startups now, maybe we shouldn't be referring to them as Unicorns anymore? Taking a term that was used to refer to exceptional businesses and proliferating the use of it makes me even more weary of VC-run companies than I already am.

But we have to maintain backwards-compatibility.

Maybe we should redefine it to only mean those that are profitable.

We need something for the > $10 billion club. Hippogriffs?

decacorn.

Does anyone know anybody who has ever ordered something from jet.com? No one I've asked has ever heard of it, and they did an enormous media blitz in Boston.

I ordered something from jet.com, was a terrible experience, would not recommend. They apparently decided that my order was fraudulent, cancelled my order, locked my account, _did not tell me and continued to send me marketing spam_. I only found out when I emailed them a few weeks later to ask "what gives?"

Yes, they had an unheard of deal on Dell 24" monitors, ordered two. Good experience. Wouldn't have heard of them if it hadn't been for my Slickdeals alert, though.

Yeah I've seen tons of ads, never heard anybody talk about it. The few items I looked at were all more expensive than Amazon.

I have ordered a couple of times, the prices were slightly cheaper than Amazon and the delivery was prompt.

It would be nice to see the same graph from parallel universes, to determine which of these companies became unicorns by mere luck.

Luck is necessary, but not sufficient condition for becoming a successful company.

It's quite scary to see so many names I've never even heard about before, and then to see some names that clearly make no sense also there.

Let's face it, for instance, Avast? Seriously who came up with that insane valuation for a company like Avast?

AFAIK Avast is betting on monetizing anti-virus usage data.

I wonder why Mojang is not on the list, though.

Either "Games aren't real software", "If it's not in the US, we mostly don't care" or "Real Unicorns take VC and get acquired by Facebook, Microsoft acquisitions don't count".

Pick your poison.

Garena is on the list, and they are in the gaming industry.

Does nobody seem bothered by the fact that "valuation" is usually bulshytt?

fab.com (included in the list as once having a 1B valuation) was sold in a $15M fire sale [1], which does make one wonder..

[1] http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-valua...

Everybody knows it's bullshit, but what else are you going to do quantitative studies on ? Number of Facebook likes ?

You can fudge it, probably 2-3x, with liquidation, but a $300mil actual valuation is nothing to sneeze at.

Prior to an IPO or acquisition, valuations have approximately the precision and accuracy of agile estimates chosen from a drop-down list populated with values from an echo chamber inhabited by....

At first I thought these were page load times until I read the description.

On topicL I am not from the US, and I've never hear of Jet, but so have none of 8 randomly selectedfriends from the US.

Very nice work but it seems like some companies are not in the right category. Like Zenefits is in Fintech category.

Building a business is hard. Really respect the achievement of these companies.

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