Start-Up Jargon That Must Die: Unicorn
What comes to listen when you hear the word unicorn? Here is my list: Stupid, mythical creature, lilliputian daughter, bad art, treasure breast, horn, rainbows, clouds, Toys 'R Us, cute, impaired, creepy, effeminate, pink, hirsuite, not-existent.
Oh yeah, and highly valued Silicon Valley commencement-up.
It'south this terminal use of unicorn that is getting on my nerves. The term has been coined, defined, and generally accepted past the dopey tech community that has for two decades spent virtually of its time coming upwards with idiotic and beautiful terms and phrases to describe mundane phenomenon or ideas. Disrupt, scalable, incentivize, takeaway, target-driven, value proposition, Web 2.0, and then on.
This butchery of the linguistic communication dates dorsum to the late 1990s, when puns like "click and mortar" epitomized the terrible wordplay of the era. It has at present morphed into something simpler, which I moaned about in 2022 and is oftentimes mocked past the TV series Silicon Valley. But something has to be done about unicorn, the stupidest term of them all.
The problem began when investor Aileen Lee defined a start-upwards worth a billion dollars as a "unicorn." Lee, a one-time CEO at RMG Networks and KleinerPerkins alum, founded a female person-run venture uppercase house, Cowboy Ventures, and asked in 2022 "how likely is it for a start-upward to accomplish a billion-dollar valuation? Is there annihilation nosotros can learn from the mega hits of the past decade, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Workday?" The Unicorn Guild was born, and due to the more often than not vapid nature of the Silicon Valley investment community, the term caught on.
Some observers—including other VCs—bespeak to the unicorn phenomenon to claim nosotros are in some other tech bubble because in that location are too many small, profitless start-ups valued at a billion bucks or more. Valuation itself, for many companies, is sketchy. Everything is dubious unless the company is public.
With a private company, for example, anyone tin get to a billion-dollar valuation easily. Let's say a biz that makes ice cream and Popsicle sticks creates i billion shares as role of its structure. I purchase one share from the founder privately. If I pay one dollar for the ane share, then the company tin exist said to have a valuation of i billion dollars.
As for a coming plummet—the chimera bursting—it could happen, but not considering the scene is insane like in 1999. Sure, there are a lot of stupid operations being chased by a lot of impaired money looking for the lucky buyout or merger or IPO. A lot of it makes no sense unless you are selling yourself on the 1999 notion of a "new economy," the very thought of which still makes me laugh.
In the beginning-up environment, the players take to somehow find a way to relax and then they can accept the fact that a gimmicky first-up social media company is worth more on the books than General Motors. They needed a new term to explain it. Something that takes away from reality.
Unicorn is, in that instance, perfect. It's non a real thing. It's a fantasy. You could say "billion-dollar kickoff-upwardly," only that would be also practical and actually describe the company. No! Use Unicorn instead.
In reality, information technology'due south all lawmaking to show you are a member of the Bullcrap Club of Northern California.
About John C. Dvorak
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/opinion/11152/start-up-jargon-that-must-die-unicorn
Posted by: webbtrus1947.blogspot.com
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