The Age of Unicorns - Fortune

Check the full article for a handy, er, bubble chart of unicorns and "decacorns"

"“I think you’re going to see a lot of failure in 2015,” says Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley, who sits on Uber’s board of directors. “If you’re a public company worth $3 billion and your stock trades down to $1 billion, you can survive it because you can still issue options to hire new employees, etc.  If it happens when you’re private, though, it becomes immediately harder to hire or to get incremental investment.”

In the meantime, expect more billion-dollar startups to emerge—at least for now. “You can’t choose not to play,” Gurley says. “If you’re in the enterprise segment and your competitors are raising $150 million at high valuations and pouring it into sales, you either can do something similar or be conservative and no longer matter.” Which might explain why some VCs continue to invest even as they predict failure. There’s always the hope and belief that the value created by a few successful unicorns will offset the losses of those that fail."

The Age of Unicorns - Fortune