Nowadays it's no longer a surprise to see the term unicorn to describe certain companies. But did you know that unicorns aren't the only mythological creatures you can describe a startup with? The innovative ecosystem is very extensive and that gives rise to a lot of terminology, from unicorns to centaurs or minotaurs.
The term unicorn refers to the mythological creature that is represented as a white horse with a twisted horn on its forehead. But, In the startup universe, a unicorn is a company that is financed with private capital and in a short time becomes worth 1 billion dollars. Aileen Lee, a former Kleiner Perkins investor, decided to give it that name because this phenomenon was very rare to see and, according to her calculations, every year four new companies became part of the unicorn list.Lee managed to make this fact visible, which, despite not being common, already existed, but by giving it the name unicorn, it came to fruition and made many more people set out to create a business unicorn. Generally speaking, we can say that these are companies that are disruptive in some aspect, and that precisely because they are so innovative they have opted for growth in market share to avoid being copied, and that has led them to grow very quickly and evolve towards the status of “winner takes all”. The term unicorn was the first, but the vast bestiary Startupero It has been growing until people started talking about Decacorns, the variation of unicorns that refers to companies that have exceeded 10 billion dollars in valuation. Something important to mention is that when a unicorn or decacorn goes public, it disappears. But unicorns and decacorns are not the only mythological beings with which we refer to certain startups, since in 2014 the term dragons also began to be used. A dragon, apart from being the typical reptilian in medieval legends, is any unicorn that has fully returned to investors the funds they once placed these. According to investors John Bacus and Hemant Bhardwaj, if you do the math you'll find that a dragon is four times rarer than a unicorn. For this reason, both believe that unicorns were a position for venture capital firms, while dragons were the ones who actually made money. To add fuel to the fire, in 2015 Dave McClure, former CEO of 500 Startups, incorporated dinosaurs into the bestiary. According to McClure dinosaurs are the big companies that had been listed on the stock market, that had public capital and that were also overvalued. Not content to get that term out of his hat, he decided to create the evolutionary chain of the unicorn. McClure said that ponies grew up to be centaurs and some of these are the ones that became unicorns. And I would define centaurs as startups with a valuation of more than 100 million dollars, while ponies are emerging companies that have a value above 10 million dollars.Continuing with the bestiary of startups, a couple of years ago people began to talk about zebras, a more popular term than the previous ones because of what they represent. The basis for this word is that in Silicon Valley and in the startup world it is mainly dominated by middle-aged white men who only seek success for profit. Zebras are characterized by creating a more profitable business model than the current one and for contributing to social change. They are called zebras because they are real animals (unlike unicorns), they are black and white (they are businesses that want to earn money, but at the same time contribute to the improvement of society) and they are social animals that live together in groups and that protect each other.Finally, a term that has begun to be used in the ecosystem is that of minotaurs. Minotaurs are those startups that are worth more than $1 billion, even if all they have done is take the money they have raised and put it in a current account.. According to the Axios website, at the beginning of 2019 there were about 56 minotaurs and he says that the first of this species was Alibaba in 2005. After seeing this zoo, we asked ourselves why these names came from, to which Nacho, director of ISDI (Higher Institute for Internet Development) replies that people need simple, hooked names to define complex concepts. And you, what is the mythological animal or being that describes your startup?
