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Equity

Back in the Unicorn Club with Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2372 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is our interview show, where we sit down with interesting, knowledgeable folks and dive deep into their favorite topics. This time around, we invited Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee to chat through her massive new article concerning the unicorn world. If you didn’t know, it was Lee who initially coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article back in 2013. Lee talked us through the data and taught us all sorts of new terms. You can sort of understand what one means when they say “unicorpse” or “zombiecorn,” but apparently there are even more exotic unicorn forms out there. We even wound up comparing venture capital returns to peaches in a bucket of piss (her words, not ours!). We also talked about where unicorns are based today (19% in New York, for example), and why seed rounds are getting bigger. But really, you should read her post while you listen so you can have all the context while we chew through the numbers! And for those of you who are here for the answer to our question, “How are Fortune 500 companies ranked?”, well, the answer is revenue and not market cap. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:16.1

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and

0:20.0

this is our interview show where we sit down with a guest, think about their work, and then unpack the rest.

0:25.6

But before we do introduce our guest, I have to say I have brought along my dear friend,

0:29.2

Marianne Asafeto. Marianne, hi, how are you and why is it not Freddie yet?

0:33.8

I'm doing great and super excited to be here.

0:36.2

How are you?

0:37.2

I'm hanging in there.

0:38.2

It's 21 degrees Fahrenheit here, which means that I have turned into a human popsicle, but the good

0:42.2

news is that we have a podcast to keep us warm and fun people to talk to.

0:45.4

Well, I am super excited to be joining you and talking to Aileen. I can't wait.

0:51.4

Unicorn is just this term that we've all been saying for years and years and just to get to talk about

0:57.0

how it came about, how it's evolved, what's ahead, I'm excited.

1:00.8

And you just let the cat out of the bag.

1:02.4

We do have Aileen Lee from Cowboy Adventures today.

1:06.0

She is a managing partner and before she did 10 years of cowboy, she was at Kleiner- Brookings for 12 for 13 years.

1:12.0

Aileen, welcome to the show.

1:13.4

Oh, thank you.

1:14.1

I'm super excited to be here.

1:15.5

So first of all, you were up late

1:17.1

finishing this massive post that just went up on Tech Runge today.

1:20.5

I'm curious just because I'm a writer,

1:22.4

when did the process of putting it together start and when

...

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