Unicorn
A unicorn is a privately held startup or company valued at least one billion dollars.
Tech Startup Toolkit
A unicorn is a privately held company valued at more than $1 billion.
- How it is used
- Frames venture capital fundraising around the scale of returns investors need from exceptional companies.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the valuation threshold and connects it to fund economics, but stops short of explaining valuation methods.
- Examples
- Uses a $20 million investment scenario, a 10× return expectation, and a possible $1 billion exit within ten years.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate whether prospective investors fit your financing stage, fund size, return model, and likely exit scale.
Investing for Programmers
A unicorn is a privately held start-up valued at at least one billion units of currency.
- How it is used
- Frames unicorns as high-upside targets within private-equity and early-stage start-up investing.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the valuation threshold and discusses rarity, execution constraints, returns, and risk without detailing valuation mechanics.
- Examples
- Uses syndicate evaluation, founder commitment, engineering talent, and public early-stage funding as concrete investment considerations.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate unicorn investing as high-upside, high-failure-risk activity and recognize syndication as a risk-reduction approach.
Related concepts
- startupkind of · A startup is a newly established company developing a product or service while pursuing growth under substantial uncertainty.
- multiple returnproduced by · A multiple return is the ratio of capital returned by an investment to the capital originally invested.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.