For our overhyped, overvalued tech startups, soon the reckoning will come | Josie Cox
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 website Crunchbase, 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 as Canada and Italy, and their heft is perhaps the most striking indicator of our global economy's return to absolute and unmitigated exuberance.
Related: Stampede of the unicorns: will a new breed of tech giants burst the bubble?
Red flags are starting to appear and we should take them seriously
Related: The WeWork debacle should be an indictment of modern finance | Nesrine Malik
Continue reading...