Skip to content
Premium Symbol Premium

Unicorns, narwhals and cockroaches: Time to brush up on today’s tech jargon

“A mythical animal typically represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead,” that’s Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of a unicorn, but it’s not the definition echoing the streets of Silicon Valley nor those of the world’s other tech hubs.

In tech land, a unicorn is a private startup company valued at $1bn or more. Aileen Lee, founder of seed-stage fund Cowboy Ventures, is credited with inventing this definition in her 2013 article for TechCrunch. More specifically, in this piece she used the term ‘unicorn’ when referring to “US-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1bn by public or private market investors”.

There’s one main problem, though: Unicorns don’t exist. Given this important fact, it seems a bit of a weird choice of word. I reckon a better choice would have been some kind of fabulous, rare and (perhaps most importantly) real animal. A pangolin, perhaps....