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Many tech startups are vastly overvalued and will one day vanish, leaving nothing but the ghost of a smile

A unicorn, as every schoolchild knows, is a legendary creature – a horse with a single pointed, spiralling horn projecting from its forehead. As far as we know, nobody has ever seen one. Why, then, is the tech commentariat apparently obsessed with the creatures? The answer is that the term was commandeered in 2013 by Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist, to describe privately held tech startups that have achieved a valuation of $1bn or more.

These strange creatures have been proliferating like rabbits. At the last count, there are more than 300 of them worldwide with a cumulative value of around $1,050bn (£803bn). The majority are based in a few countries. China, with more than 130, has the largest unicorn population, followed by the US (85), India (20) and the UK (seven) and a longish tail of other countries.

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from US news | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WLBhlM