Tech's Enchanted Forest Is Getting Overpopulated
Unicorns? Centaurs? Dragons? Someone needs to make sense of Silicon Valley's nonsensical naming strategies.
Startup cryptozoology is getting out of hand.
Photographer: Ian Waldie/Getty Images AsiaPacThis post originally appeared in Money Stuff.
One of these days we are going to need a new Linnaeus to clean up startup cryptozoology. Start with “unicorn,” the now-completely-standard term for a private technology company with a valuation of $1 billion or more. This became jargon in 2013, but it was just an extension of the common usage of “unicorn” to refer to any sort of rare, desirable thing. In 2013, billion-dollar startups were rareand desirable; now they are common and a lot of them seem kind of terrible. A good term these days for a startup with a $1 billion valuation might be “startup.” At some point, a big and dingy flock of unicorns just starts to look like a bunch of horses.