Back in the Unicorn Club with Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee

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Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our interview show, where we sit down with interesting, knowledgeable folk and dive deep into their favorite topics. This time around, we invited Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee to chat through her massive new article concerning the unicorn world. If you didn’t know, it was Lee who initially coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article back in 2013.

Lee talked us through the data and taught us all sorts of new terms. You can sort of understand what one means when they say “unicorpse” or “zombiecorn,” but apparently there are even more exotic unicorn forms out there. We even wound up comparing venture capital returns to peaches in a bucket of piss (her words, not ours!).

We also talked about where unicorns are based today (19% in New York, for example), and why seed rounds are getting bigger. But really, you should read her post while you listen so you can have all the context while we chew through the numbers!

And for those of you who are here for the answer to our question, “How are Fortune 500 companies ranked?”, well, the answer is revenue and not market cap!