#1 is Klarna, the company that will let you finance a pizza over the next 4 months. Not sure I'd be trumpeting that as innovative.

Easy to discount companies when you overly simplify them -

ie “#2 in the US is Stripe, the company that lets you pay on a credit card. Not sure if I’d be trumpeting that as innovative!”

I didn’t.

I looked at the list, it might be my US-centric bias but I'd only heard of 2 in that list before and they weren't big

I don't know what you mean by "weren't big" - $1B is the absolute smallest you can be to be a unicorn.

Ever heard of fucking Spotify?

You mean the low margin unprofitable company that is at the mercy of the record labels and their “product” is the equivalent of a minor division for Google, Amazon and Apple?

Their product is still better designed than the ones came out of Google, Amazon and Apple.

Maybe so. But isn’t it a Pyrrhic victory for a for profit company to have a better designed product that is still losing money? That’s not exactly a definition of a “successful company”

"might be"