For our overhyped, overvalued tech startups, soon the reckoning will come | Josie Cox
Investors’ money has been sloshing around, caused by low interest rates, creating a surge in billion-dollar companies. It can’t last
In November 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee published an article coining the term “unicorn” to describe a startup that’s less than a decade old and worth at least $1bn (about £783m now). She chose the word carefully, to convey a mix of rarity and alchemy. What Lee seemingly didn’t anticipate was that just a few years later it would have become a flagrant misnomer: these days there’s nothing rare about unicorns.
According to , 142 new companies met the criteria in 2019, taking the herd size to over 500. They’ve got a combined worth of more than $2tn, which is bigger than the gross domestic product of countries such
