Is Unicorn Just Another Word for Subprime?

大量的墨水已经洒在了如雨后春笋般增长的年轻，私人控股的技术公司价值超过10亿美元。这些公司俗称独角兽。

但许多风险投资家和分析师并不认为这种趋势是好事。原因是：他们担心，企业正变得痴迷于达到独角兽的地位，从而损害了他们的业务。

“The desire for these marquee valuations isn’t healthy,” says Mark Leslie, former CEO of Veritas Software Corp., which merged with Mountain View, California–based Symantec in 2005. “I think the competition for valuation is destructive. It’s kind of a fever in Silicon Valley.” Leslie invests in tech start-ups, serves on their boards and lectures in management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

The unicorn universe now consists of 129 companies, according to Dow Jones & Co.’s VentureSource. San Francisco–basedride-hailing服务宇部r Technologies以510亿美元位居榜首，紧随其后的是北京电子公司小米（Xiaomi），为460亿美元；San Francisco’s hospitality company Airbnb at $25.5 billion; 软件公司Palantir Technologies以200亿美元的价格收购了加州帕洛阿尔托。

专家们谴责对独角兽地位的追求，因为它分散了创始人专注于业务的注意力，扭曲了资本配置过程，使得一些有价值的初创企业难以吸引资本。

Blame for the trend should be spread widely, experts say. “It’s a collective game in which people — the whole ecosystem, including VCs and founders — are willing to sacrifice,” says Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “The idea is that getting to $1 billion is a path to prosperity that makes up for today. Whether that’s true is irrelevant.” In fact, it’s often not true, he says. Even journalists are complicit in the process, with their glowing stories about unicorns, Damodaran maintains.

“Individual companies are being mismanaged” amid the preoccupation with $1 billion valuations, he says. “Products are being developed that shouldn’t be.” When companies don’t develop their businesses rationally, there’s a collective damage to the entire start-up system, Damodaran says. “It will take down good companies and bad companies.”

As an example, he citesSan Francisco–based payment services company Square, which created huge buzz with its $6 billion valuation last year but drew a wave of bad publicity last month when its initial public offering valued the company at just $2.9 billion. Although Square’s revenue is growing quickly, so are its net losses. If the company had been more realistic about its valuation, it wouldn’t have suffered as much criticism when the IPO came out, Damodaran says.

其他在今年上市时跌跌撞撞的独角兽包括总部位于加利福尼亚州红木市的独角兽云存储公司邮箱and Brooklyn, New York’s craft web site Etsy. “Great companies have to realize that much of their value comes from the credibility of management,” Damodaran says. “If you’re spreading a number that’s not the right value, then people will think you’re cooking the books.”

The only time valuation really matters is when a company is sold, experts say. Indeed, the unicorn valuation is merely an “interim” one, says Venky Ganesan, a managing director of venture capital firm Menlo Ventures in Menlo Park, California. “Some people consider a unicorn valuation as subprime,” he says. “It’s not the right focus, unless it’s tied to an investment strategy. You should only raise money when you need it, and raise it prudently.”

专家们说，那些专注于达到10亿美元高原的公司高管，往往是那些对自己的业务关注不够的高管。”技术咨询公司高德纳（Gartner）驻加州圣克拉拉（Santa Clara）的研究总监瓦西尔•姆拉乔夫（Vassil Mladjov）表示：“每次筹集资金，你都会离开。”你把目光从球上移开了。你不能用电话来管理你的公司。”

There’s a certain amount of hubris at work. “The biggest distraction is that people get tied up in an ego boost instead of the fundamentals of building revenue and profit,” Ganesan says.

Venture capitalists have their own obsession with unicorns that exacerbates the problem, experts say. “I recently talked to a top-ten VC who said, ‘We’ll only invest in unicorns,’” Mladjov says. “He said unless the market is huge, they don’t care about anything else. They don’t care if a company is making $10 million in profits. VCs are putting oil on the fire.”

Those companies that don’t make the $1 billion cutoff can suffer as a result. “There are some really great companies whose interim valuations are lower than $1 billion,” Ganesan says. “But unfortunately, we live inLake Wobegon, where everybody thinks they’re above average.”