Billion Dollar Unicorns: Good, Bad and Ugly

You’ve heard me and others comment on the issue of artificially bloated up Unicorns and their questionable exit paths into the public market, or even into the arms of private suiters. In this post, I want to highlight some really good Unicorns, lest you think all Unicorns are artificially bloated. And, I will also point out the at risk ones.

Some of my favorite Unicorns are ServiceNow, Tableau, Marketo, and FireEye. All four are covered extensively in my Billion Dollar Unicorns book. Our more recent coverage on these companies also show good performance:

• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Expect Acquisitions From ServiceNow
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Will IBM Acquire FireEye?
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Tableau Continues its Precise Execution
•  How Marketo Is Faring In The Public Market

Also showing decent performance are some other public Unicorns:

• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Splunk Beefs Up Cyber Security
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: New Relic Moves Deeper into Enterprise
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Zendesk and Freshdesk in Expansion Mode
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Rapid7 Delivers a Successful IPO

The ones that I believe look precarious are:

• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Pinterest Eyes E-Commerce
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Box Struggles in its Public Avatar
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Etsy Continues to Fumble
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Zulily Attempts to Make a Turnaround
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Spotify Gearing up to Face Apple Music

Some private Unicorns that I think will do fine in the public market:

• Billion Dollar Unicorns: InsideSales.com Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Klarna Takes the Risk out of E-Commerce
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Auction.com in Expansion Mode
• Billion Dollar Unicorn: Taboola Faces New Competition From Google
• Billion Dollar Unicorns: Twilio is Revolutionizing Telecommunications
• Billion Dollar Unicorn: Does Gaurav Dhillon Have Another Winner With SnapLogic?

This list is by no means exhaustive. However, I wanted to highlight that the Unicorn mania is not all bad, even though the nonsensical behavior around it has become rather unappetizing, and a massive turn off for a lot of people, including myself.

This segment is a part in the series : Billion Dollar Unicorns