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Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius. Read More...

Flying Cars Are Coming. The Next Installment of Those 140 Characters Is Here…

Flying Cars Are Coming. The Next Installment of Those 140 Characters Is Here…

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weasley’s flying car | Ashley Wheat | Flickr

As you know, we’ve been wondering about who those 140 characters are who Peter Thiel may well have been referring to when he said, “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

Since we’ve personally been in the industry since the early days of Web 1.0 in New York and spent a considerable amount of time in Silicon Valley as well, we’ve decided to take it upon ourselves to attempt to identify some of those characters, many of whom we’ve met and/or have gotten to know. Over the years, we’ve seen people and companies come and go. Some were bad timing. Many were simply bad ideas. Some were acquired for unbelievable amounts of money, only to disappear forever, leaving the then suddenly wealthy founders looking like geniuses. Tech is a constantly shifting landscape and people and companies come and go and fortunes made and lost at Internet speed.

Here are our picks for the next 40 of the 140, with some anecdotes and insights on the developing industry and its rising stars and investors, in no particular order. Without further ado, we’re letting this baby fly. Onward and forward. Read More...