Aileen Lee chose the word unicorn in 2013 for one reason: the thing she was describing was almost mythologically rare.

Her count: 39 US software companies founded since 2003 valued at a billion dollars or more — out of roughly 60,000 funded software and internet companies. That is 0.07%. One in 1,538.

By May 2024, the count was 1,248 worldwide.

A category with more than a thousand members is not a unicorn. It is a horse with good branding — and the escalating vocabulary that followed (decacorn above $10 billion, hectocorn above $100 billion) is itself the admission that the original threshold stopped carrying information.

Two findings from the original article are worth more than the word, and both cut against how the term is now used.

It took seven years on average to reach a liquidity event — extending beyond eight when still-private companies were included. The unicorn as an overnight event is a myth about a myth. Seven years is a long, unglamorous stretch during which nobody outside the company knows whether any of it is working.

And the value was grotesquely concentrated. Of the $260 billion aggregate value of all 39 companies, one — a single super-unicorn — accounted for almost half.

That second number is the one that should have travelled, because it changes what the category means. The unicorn club was not 39 comparable successes. It was one enormous outcome and 38 companies sharing the other half, which is roughly the shape of every venture portfolio ever assembled, and precisely the shape the word club conceals.

This page explains the terms and is not investment advice.