How many unicorns are just piñatas filled with expired candy?

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2022

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex dared to refresh perhaps the most common conversation in startups these days: the ubiquity, and resulting irrelevance, of unicorns. Our big question wasn't a simple one: Do we care that the meaning of unicorns has been hollowed out? The conversation ran the gamut, starting with information on unicorn creation rates, startup hit success and of course, funding booms leading to aforementioned ripple effects. The majority of our time was spent asking more meta questions about the moniker, like how the quality bar has changed for $1 billion dollar companies and why late-stage thinks it needs to act like early stage? On TC+, we've recently written about the changing characteristics of unicorns, and how public markets may bring a not-so-private reckoning to tech's stars. (For more on the software valuation thing, head here.) 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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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers
0:15.2	and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Natasha Masquerainis and this is our Wednesday show where we niche down
0:20.5	into a single topic, ask a question and unpack the rest.
0:24.6	This week we're asking, has the meaning of unicorn been hollowed out?
0:28.0	And if so, do we care?
0:29.8	The one and only Alex Wilhelm, of course, is here to join me to ask and answer all the questions
0:34.2	what's going on Alex? Hey so as a data point I can't actually do all the asking and all
0:38.8	the answering but if you have a variety of questions I will endeavor to supply at least some words in response.
0:45.2	Perfect, okay, well question number one is how the hell is this pink new keyboard?
0:49.2	Because it is dope and if you haven't seen the keyboard go to Alex's Twitter I am jealous.
0:54.0	Okay so first of all pink is an underrated color especially hot pink aka fuchsia and I have a pink
0:59.7	hymac and I like to color coordinate my electronics because I'm a nerd and so I had this
1:05.7	awesome new mechanical keyboard in hot pink and I'll tell you this Natasha I can't
1:09.1	type for a dang on it because it's a new keyboard and so it's slightly different from all my other keyboards and so I kind of have to relearn how to type on it.
1:17.4	So I'm going to love it.
1:18.9	Currently it's like walking with my shoelaces tied together.
1:21.6	I actually did not think about that. Like I rarely
1:24.7	upgrade my keyboard setups, but of course as writers we like it's as dramatic as like changing the
1:29.6	seat you sit on because this is like our only tool for our work so once you change
1:34.6	anything it can either go really well or really poorly. Absolutely and that's why I'm
1:39.2	going to die doing work on a Bluetooth Mac external keyboard because I have typed so many words on
1:46.8	this keyboard and like in iterations they're off of it because I've ruined a bunch
	...

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