Tech’s $1 Billion Unicorns Eclipsed by Centaurs
Dreams of instant fortunes are giving way to the slog of actually operating profitably.
What’s old is new again.
Source: DEA/S. Vannini/De Agostini Editorial
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s startup LoudCloud clinched a fundraising round at an $820 million valuation even as the dotcom boom unraveled in 2000, management expected cheers from staff. Instead, the first question was: “Why didn’t we get a $1 billion valuation?”
Unicorn envy — the quest for those nine zeroes that grab headlines and open wallets — has only snowballed since. A decade of cheap money flowing into wannabe Amazon’s and Google’s led to February’s record of 1,000 billion-dollar-plus private companies worldwide, collectively worth $3.3 trillion, according to CBInsights. Counting unicorns has become a metric of national success: French President Emmanuel Macron targeted 25 unicorns by 2025, and got there three years early.