The Rise of the ‘Unicorns’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It also seems to me that SpaceX should not be in this list. Being a company that focuses on physical technologies, it is almost a different beast altogether than the rest of the software-based group. Hard to compare it's company and funding structure to the others when it involves a much more complicated logistical chain, development period, and roll out.
EDIT: SpaceX has received almost $1 billion in funding from NASA over the years. It's unclear to me, however, how this funding works. Is it an up-front payment for future launches, or purely award money?
But it's par for the course in that industry.
If anyone knows, I would really like to learn how that NASA funding works.
Though I thought FB stock would slip and permanently stay under $30 after the IPO so what do I know :)
From this NYtimes list, my two favourites are SpaceX and Stripe.
If by MySpace, you mean a social network that had a meteoric rise then sort of died out, perhaps. But MySpace actually did take the giant buyout they were offered. As far as I know, they never turned down a 10 figure exit like Snapchat.
Though $800 million in the bank and a $15 billion valuation provides a pretty decent war chest to gobble up threatening competitors with...
Which is presumably what the OP was talking about. MySpace was hyped and valued beyond belief, and then came crashing down. The same could well happen to Snapchat.
Having said all that, I'm judging it from anecdotal evidence available to me. None of my friends use snapchat (all late twenties and early thirties) but they do use twitter, fb, vine (on occasion), whatsapp etc. The only people I know that have snapchat on their phone and use it regularly are all < 23 yrs old. Of course, could simply be my friends and I are totally out of touch!
Edit: interestingly, just realised none of my friends (female or male) use pinterest either (which, from what I've read, has a wider demographic). So maybe we're just a bunch of luddite weirdos...
It would be interesting to know what's the percentage of Snapchat users still use it daily after high schools. That would make or break the whole company.
I imagine that would play (or would have played) some role in his decision.
Never mind the also-rans like Uber or airbnb, who frankly are just playing fast and loose with the rules, and never mind the companies like square or stripe or Dropbox who are using new technology to solve old problems, the real reveal in this list (and my poor knowledge of the other (70!) billion dollar unicorns, is that American public investments made decades ago are paying real dividends in private capital even today.
And the UK? We don't even have an aircraft carrier. The last time we landed something on Mars, it was not the result of a pipeline of funded missions, it was a one time try out.
Damn it. We are going to have to go European if we want to go toe to toe with US, India and China.
And those investments start today, and trust me, our politics is too jammed up to make them.
So who has been making yours? Can we borrow them?
Edit: just to clarify, yes SpaceX / Musk really took risks and deserves the rewards. yes, they are "just" borrowing NASA technology. And that's the point. Only the US has the technology to borrow and the willingness to hand it over to the private sector. That's kind of the unfair bit
* Three of the ten unicorns (Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe) were funded by Y Combinator, while a fourth (Pinterest) was founded by two-time YC alum Ben Silbermann.
* All of the unicorns are headquartered in California. Eight are in "Silicon Valley" (i.e., the actual physical valley plus San Francisco), and two (Snapchat and SpaceX) are in Los Angeles.
But it also missed a lot of other Californian unicorns like Theranos.
I'm also betting on the term "uberpreneur" to blow up soon, which refers to people making a living off the on-demand economy.
One of the most commonly invoked takedowns of the ever-increasing and
mind-blowing valuation levels the company has achieved — $40 billion at
last count — is this:
"Investors are valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole taxi market!"
The implication?
Investors are nuts.
Well, investors are indeed valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole
taxi market.
But it turns out that that's not nuts.
In its most mature market, San Francisco, the four-year old Uber is already
bigger than the local taxi market. Much bigger, in fact.
According to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who spoke at the DLD Conference in
Munich on Sunday, the taxi market in San Francisco is about $140 million
per year.
Uber's revenues in San Francisco, meanwhile, are running at $500 million
per year.
That's more than three times the size of the taxi market.
And Uber's revenues in San Francisco are still growing at about 200% per year.
If I can buy Stock, I will bet my House on Uber.
Uber seem to be having hard time gaining traction in Europe. And their value so far is an app and ignoring regulation and medallion scarcity in US.
They are one case away of complete disaster if a court declares their partners as employees ...
I'm curious why you think the market for Dropbox is larger than the market for Uber?
With the numbers I would put in those parenthesis, I'd say that uber is probably undervalued...at least relative to how Wall Street would value the company if it were public.
Most startups tank. The reason they're calling these companies unicorns is because of how rare success is, especially at this scale. They don't mean literally that these companies are imaginary.