There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding and $1.3T valuation

Re:There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding... by johnloeber on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @04:10AM (#10929481)

Look at the bottom-right of the infographic: the social networking apps. Facebook and LinkedIn are no longer unicorn startups: they are mature companies with a substantial presence on the stock market. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so why list it as a separate unicorn? That's double-counting the valuation of Instagram. Same for WhatsApp. In the "Big Data" section, there is Palantir. Palantir hasn't been a startup for several years now.

This infographic is garbage.

The rest of the article is an eye-rollingly superficial summary of irrelevant statistics. "6 years: the median time to become a unicorn". That's not a reflection on unicorns, that's a reflection on the technology market over the past decade.

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Re:There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding... by acqq on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @04:15AM (#10929495)

Their definition: every company younger than 25 years valued over 1 billion (?)

tristanj in this discussion linked to the document where they state that.

(On completely tangential side, and as a good comparison when speaking about wealth creation, Mike Bloomberg seems to recently got personally 11 billion richer in one and half years, if Forbes is to be believed, even if his company isn't public and is more than 30 years old, so I'm really curious how.)

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Re:There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding... by rgbrenner on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @04:26AM (#10929542)

If that's their definition... then where is Google? They're worth $500B, yet they aren't in the list.

So not only do they have this ridiculous definition, but they can't even follow their own rules.

Edit: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, PayPal also qualify. Also excluded.

They should add these.. it'll make for a better click-bait headline. That's $1T in additional value right there.

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Re:There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding... by johnloeber on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @04:31AM (#10929560)

They don't follow their own definition then. Maybe they mean every software company? (But then why include hardware companies in the graphic?)

Here are some fun facts I gathered in the last few minutes:

* There are 2,266 companies listed on US Exchanges currently with a market cap above $1bn

* 874 of these companies have IPOed since January 1, 2001.

Unfortunately I could not query when these companies were founded, but is it possible that many of these companies were founded in the last 25 years? I think that's possible. In which case this graphic is probably missing quite a few companies...

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Re:There are now 229 unicorn startups, with $175B in funding... by meddlepal on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @04:17AM (#10929501)

That is a rediculous definition.

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