Profile of a Unicorn

An interesting article on TechCrunch, written by the folks at Cowboy Ventures – they put together a in-depth profile of startups that are now valued at $1B or more, referring to these mythical creatures as “Unicorns”.

Below are some highlights I found interesting.  Be sure to check out the rest of the article here.

Fun Unicorn Facts:

• There are currently 39 Unicorns
• Only 0.7% of venture backed companies (from ’03-’10) have grown up to be Unicorns
• On average four Unicorns were born per year from 2003 -2010
• It has taken seven plus years on average for these Unicorns to reach a liquidity event and a third of Unicorns are still private
• There are more consumer oriented Unicorns than enterprise oriented Unicorns
• BUT enterprise Unicorns have delivered more value per private dollar invested (26x total capital raised vs. 11x for consumer)
• Average age of a Unicorn founder is 34 and there were on average three co-founders at each Unicorn
• 90% of founding teams either worked together previously or went to school together
• 80% of Unicorns had at least one co-founder who had previously founded a company
• Few companies are the result of a successful pivot; ~90% of companies are still working on their original product vision