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Genuine questions: Why do people care about unicorns so much? Why is having a bunch of $1bn+ companies necessarily a Good Thing? Is having lots of smaller co

• jfengel 6y ago
  Two things: 1. Unicorns are lottery tickets. People dream of being rich. 2. Unicorns represent Big Wins: an idea that was worth a huge sum of money. It makes the world a richer place, figuratively and literally. The person who had it (and more importantly, the people who run it) are Big Heroes. Companies like Facebook and Uber aren't just big companies. They change the world, making value from something that wasn't valuable before. That may be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, but it's a Thing in a way that ten thousand smaller companies don't. As with celebrities, we probably talk about them disproportionately to the value -- in part because they give us something in common to talk about. But there's usually some kind of "there" there, as well.