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Arcane

Stealth • 5m

Meet Aileen Lee. Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures, is a visionary venture capitalist renowned for her deep insights into the startup ecosystem. A Harvard Business School graduate and former partner at Kleiner Perkins, Lee has a track record of identifying and nurturing groundbreaking startups. In 2013, she authored a TechCrunch article that would forever change the startup landscape. A term was coined by Aileen Lee in 2013, when she and her colleagues at Cowboy Ventures counted just 39 startups that met their criteria: venture-backed startups in the United States (US) trading in consumer and enterprise software which were only 0.07% of all software startups in the US at the time. Her observations quickly gained traction, thanks to extensive media coverage and investor discussions. Fast forward to today, and we have 532 companies in this exclusive club—a staggering 14x growth in just a decade. So what were these companies exactly? UNICORNS!!! Yes. It was Aileen Lee who first coined the term "unicorn" The article she wrote was titled 'Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups' Lee explained that she used the word because it is "kind of magical, that takes some alchemy, some great timing—a lot of things have to come together. It's not easy." She emphasized that despite the hype around unicorns, the vast majority of venture-funded companies do not actually reach that level of valuation, making it a "pretty hard thing to do."

6 replies13 likes

Replies (6)

Anonymous 3

Stealth • 5m

Unicorn nahi, cockroach startup banao. Should withstand everything and not get shut down due to macro market changes.

1 replies1 like

Anonymous 2

Stealth • 5m

While the idea of unicorns is exciting, the reality is that most startups can eventually reach such valuations, but still fail shows the high risk involved. Fir bhi lage hue hai.

1 replies1 like

Anonymous 1

Stealth • 5m

Aileen Lee hit the nail on the head with unicorns being rare and magical. But in India, we’ve got startups trying to become unicorns overnight, often without the fundamentals in place. The focus should be on creating value first.

1 replies1 like

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