The 1,000th Unicorn Joins the Herd

There are more $1 billion startups than ever

- Joshua Brustein

Hubert Palan signed on to Zoom from his home in Oakland, Calif., on Feb. 2 and prepared to address the 400 or so employees at his startup, Productboard Inc. As chief executive officer, he had big news: Productboard had just raised a new round of funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion. That meant the company could now officially call itself a unicorn—the term for a startup that investors deem worth $1 billion or more.

Palan, a wide-smiling 43-year-old father of two from the Czech Republic, tried to make the video call a celebratory moment. “I was jumping around over Zoom,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yay!’” He took out a unicorn-shaped Christmas ornament, which he’d decorated with a small sticker of the Productboard logo and attached to a long chain. He hung the ornament around his neck. He whooped and cheered, along with his staff—though he couldn’t hear them because they were all on mute.

Becoming a unicorn may have been a big deal for Productboard, but it’s a distinction that means far less within the tech industry than it once did. The term emerged almost a decade ago, a time when startups worth $1 billion were rare and treasured, something only the luckiest of founders and investors would ever glimpse with their own eyes. Now the production of unicorns is reaching the scale of industrial agriculture.