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Lee’s billion-dollar figure set an arbitrary but gee-whiz number as the entry fee to a club of success. More subtly, it transformed “worth a billion dollars” from an adjective to a noun. And then, in a blink, that noun became an essential fact of a company. In her article, Lee counted fourteen private unicorns; today, TechCrunch’s unicorn “leaderboard” lists a hundred and sixty-eight, a hundred and two of them in the United States.
Both venture capitalists and art buyers are in the business of valuing the invaluable. Both stake their reputations on exquisite selection. Both nurture talent before it can support itself. Both have a soft spot for youth, for unbowed ego, for the myth of solitary genius, for the next new thing. Both operate in a world of frustratingly limited information and maddeningly unpredictable success. Both depend on consumer culture while holding themselves superior to it. And both the art market and venture investing have become increasingly winner-take-all games, with more clout to the companies and artists backed by the most powerful dealers or venture capitalists.
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Perhaps the most famous criticism of unicorn funding came in a much-discussed blog post by the venture investor Bill Gurley, who lamented startups raising follow-on investments at what he called “dirty valuations,” which made a company a unicorn in theory but contained provisions that hurt early investors.
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-techs-unicorn-cult-can-learn-from-the-art-world
