How many unicorns are just piñatas filled with expired candy?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex dared to refresh perhaps the most common conversation in startups these days: the ubiquity, and resulting irrelevance, of unicorns. Our big question wasn’t a simple one:

Do we care that the meaning of unicorns has been hollowed out?

The conversation ran the gamut, starting with information on unicorn creation rates, startup hit success and of course, funding booms leading to aforementioned ripple effects. The majority of our time was spent asking more meta questions about the moniker, like how the quality bar has changed for $1 billion dollar companies and why late-stage thinks it needs to act like early stage?

On TC+, we’ve recently written about the changing characteristics of unicorns, and how public markets may bring a not-so-private reckoning to tech’s stars. (For more on the software valuation thing, head here.)

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.