Essay · 15 min read

Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups

Aileen Lee · techcrunch.com Free Beginner

The 2013 essay that coined the word unicorn for a startup valued at over $1 billion, by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, with the data on how rare they were.

  • Lee counted 39 US software companies valued at over $1 billion, about 0.07% of venture-backed software startups.
  • About four unicorns were born a year in the decade she studied.
  • Enterprise unicorns raised less private capital than consumer ones.
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The question it answers

  1. What is a unicorn startup?

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