{"id":887,"date":"2017-02-09T09:29:51","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T09:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isadviser.com\/?p=887"},"modified":"2017-04-25T13:04:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T13:04:31","slug":"unicorns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/unicorns\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Unicorns Are No Substitute for a Competitive, Innovative Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The world\u2019s unicorns, VC-backed startups worth more than $1 billion, have been getting a lot of press lately. At the moment, Google News lists about 16 million results for\u00a0Uber and 7\u00a0million results for\u00a0Snapchat. By contrast, there are\u00a0fewer than 3.5 million stories about Walmart, 2.6 million about General Motors, and fewer than 700,000 focused on Exxon. Unicorns are to business journalists what Kim Kardashian is to Instagram users.<\/p>\n<p>All this excitement about the unicorns is understandable \u2014 up to a point. Many of them have been growing at a ferocious pace. For instance, Snapchat\u2019s\u00a0recent IPO filing\u00a0revealed that the company grew revenues by 600% (to $404 million) in 2016. Airbnb\u00a0has nearly doubled its user base every year since 2012 and is now worth $30 billion \u2014\u00a0nearly as much as Marriott International, the world\u2019s largest hotel chain. That sort of nosebleed growth has panicked a lot of big-company CEOs who live in fear of being \u201cUberized.\u201d Those fears are not entirely unfounded. The explosive growth of ride sharing is a big reason why Hertz reported dismal quarterly results in November 2016, leading to a 23% drop in its market value.<\/p>\n<p>Adding to this angst are the feverish predictions of industry pundits who believe today\u2019s corporate dinosaurs are about to be wiped out by giant unicorn-shaped asteroids. For example, in&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2017\/02\/a-few-unicorns-are-no-substitute-for-a-competitive-innovative-economy\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2017\/02\/a-few-unicorns-are-no-substitute-for-a-competitive-innovative-economy\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-854 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/HBR.jpg\" alt=\"Unicorns \" width=\"139\" height=\"84\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The world\u2019s unicorns, VC-backed startups worth more than $1 billion, have been getting a lot of press lately. At the moment, Google News lists about 16 million results for\u00a0Uber and 7\u00a0million results for\u00a0Snapchat. By contrast, there are\u00a0fewer than 3.5 million stories about Walmart, 2.6 million about General Motors, and fewer than 700,000 focused on Exxon. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":888,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[28,60,131,29,27,17,126,146,130],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":889,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions\/889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/isadviser.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}