Everyone agrees that 2013 was a good year for spotting unicorns. No fewer than 39 of the beasts were sighted. In previous decades there had been on average four born a year. But the once shy beast has become increasingly common, at least in California. As 2015 drew to a close, there were 69 recorded births this year.
These unicorns are not the mythical beasts of medieval imagination, but financial shorthand for tech companies which have reached a private valuation of $1 billion. In their time – the Jurassic era in the tech world – Apple, Google and Facebook were unicorns.
