Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A bill was introduced that would protect in vitro fertilization from possible state restrictions, dozens of British women in finance described post-#MeToo diversity efforts as weak and ineffective, and Aileen Lee reflects on 10 years of the unicorn. Have a relaxing weekend!
– One in a billion. A little more than a decade ago, Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee wrote a blog post. It was called “Welcome to the Unicorn Club,” and it gave a name to a certain startup milestone: reaching a billion-dollar valuation.
Since then, “unicorn” has become a widely-used term throughout the tech world—although Lee says she never expected it to catch on like it did. To mark the 10-year anniversary of her addition to the Silicon Valley lexicon, Lee and Cowboy Ventures chief of staff Allegra Simon published an updated analysis of the unicorn.
In late 2013, Lee’s initial analysis found only 39 unicorns out of thousands of startups. Of that small batch, 60% were consumer-facing, none had a female CEO, and only 5% had a female cofounder.
Today, there are 532 unicorns—a 1200% increase. Nearly 80% of these billion-dollar companies are now enterprise businesses, 5% have a female CEO, and 14% have a female cofounder.
That’s “not as much improvement on gender as we wanted,” Lee says, but she points out that unicorn founders have diversified in other ways. Ten years ago, two-thirds of them had gone to a “top 10” college or university; today, only 20% have. A decade ago, 10% of founders were considered “non-technical;” that share is 40% now.
And when you look at the most successful unicorns, women have a strong showing. Among unicorns that have gone public—just 3% of the total pool—there’s greater gender diversity. Fourteen percent of companies in what Lee calls the “elite public unicorn club” have a female CEO and 21% have a female cofounder.
While some high-profile unicorns of a decade ago have suffered a disappointing fate, from fire sales to public listings flops to smaller private valuations, overall the value of the original cohort held up. Eighty percent of the original unicorns are worth more today than they were in 2013, the analysis found.
“I wish I had been prescient enough 10 years ago to say, ‘Imagine, 10 years from now, there are going to be 14 times more,’” Lee says of the unicorn today. And she wishes she could have predicted how founder criteria would change: “It will no longer be important for you to have been a white male computer science guy from Stanford.”
Read her full analysis here.
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe
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PARTING WORDS
"I'm trying to imagine it as if I'm sitting in a living room with friends and people who don’t know anything about gymnastics, and I'm kind of just walking them through it and explaining how things go."
—Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman on becoming an on-air gymnastics analyst for ESPN
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