Unicorn (Startup)
A privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion. The term was coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in 2013 to emphasize the statistical rarity of such companies—like the mythical creature, they were supposed to be almost impossible to find.
Biological Context
The unicorn metaphor ironically inverts biological reality. In nature, extreme rarity usually signals endangered status or evolutionary dead ends. The startup 'unicorn' celebrates rarity as desirable, but many unicorns share traits with cancer cells: unconstrained growth, ignoring market signals, and optimizing for valuation over sustainability.
Business Application
By 2024, there were over 1,200 unicorns globally—making the term almost meaningless. More telling than the valuation milestone is what happens after: WeWork and Theranos became cautionary tales of unicorns that prioritized growth over fundamentals. The biological lesson: organisms optimized for a single metric (size, speed, growth rate) rarely survive environmental changes.