Hi my name is Philippe Cases and I am the CEO of Spoke Software who published the landscape and Ebooks on which John Koetsier based his article. The goal of our EBook and of John Koetsier’s article is to give some numbers around this Unicorn phenomenon and show a long-term perspective. Reading through the comments, I would like to point out few things:
1) A unicorn is a company that reached the US$ 1 Billion mark from a private transaction. We went back until 2000 to identify all the unicorns we could, independently of what status they are now. We may have missed some but the goal was to identify when, where geographically and where in the technology landscape, unicorns appeared;
2) About 25% of the companies that have the Unicorn Status have been either acquired or went public so they are technically beyond the unicorn stage but we still want to know what they will become and it is important to identify that they were unicorns at one point.
3) We also want to know which unicorns got sold below market like Gilt or Fab and which company is going under and we also want to track companies like Facebook or Alibaba who are now worth several US$ 100 billion.
4) Facebook, Zalando and LinkedIn did receive US$ 1Billion dollar valuation while private. Palantir is a Decacorn as well. Skyscanner is now a unicorn but we only saw a press announcement of this status in 1/2016;
5) We don’t expect to be fully exhaustive at this point and people have pointed 14 unicorns that we hadn’t identified and we are in the process of adding them to the landscape. SpaceX is part of the landscape already and we are checking for Tesla. Google never reached the US$ 1 Billion valuation while private so isn’t part of the unicorn.
I hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions. I would be happy to answer.