Aileen Lee Counted Thirty-Nine, November 2013

The word "unicorn" entered venture-capital vocabulary on 2 November 2013, in a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee — and the count it established has never stopped running.

Startup office glass meeting room — **1,200+** — approximate global unicorn count tracked by CB Insights by end of 2023Photo: Ketut Subiyanto / Pexels

01 / VocabularyThirty-Nine Companies, One Word

Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures and a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, published her analysis screening all US software companies founded since 2003 that had reached a private valuation of at least $1 billion. She found thirty-nine. The list included Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Snapchat, Uber, and Workday. The median time from founding to billion-dollar valuation across the group was seven years; the average was a fraction shorter. Consumer companies appeared more frequently than enterprise ones, though enterprise businesses tended to exit at higher multiples. Lee chose the term "unicorn" deliberately: companies reaching that threshold were roughly as rare as the mythical animal.

The original article was a piece of data journalism more than rhetoric. Lee assembled the count from Crunchbase and public reporting, cross-checked against known financing rounds. Her methodology was explicit — US-headquartered, software-centric, founded 2003 or later — which gave the term a defined edge that later usage would erode.

A whiteboard covered in a handwritten cap table — percentage columns, founder rows, round labels — in a plain office — 39 — US software companies (founded 2003 or later) at $1bn+ private valuation as of November 2013

The printed cover of an S-1 registration statement lying on a wooden desk, corner turned, grain visible at extreme close focus — **$1bn** — the valuation threshold defining the categoryPhoto: RDNE Stock project / Pexels

What happened after was compression rather than rarity. The SoftBank Vision Fund, which closed at $98.6 billion in May 2017, wrote checks large enough to push dozens of companies past the billion-dollar mark in a single financing. CB Insights, tracking the category Lee created, recorded more than 1,200 unicorns globally by the end of 2023 — a figure that, measured against Lee's original thirty-nine, shows the label had become a valuation bracket rather than a distinction. A subset earned its own animal: the "decacorn," a private company valued at $10 billion or more.

The original thirty-nine fared unevenly. Some listed, some were acquired, some failed. Theranos — not on Lee's 2013 list, though it would later claim unicorn status — became the category's cautionary case. Lee's article remains the timestamped origin of a word now embedded in finance reporting worldwide.