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Fudge Sunday - The Last Decacorn
This week we look at 1980s animation nostalgia, our first unicorn sighting, guerrilla marketing, and anhedonic investment themes.
The Last Decacorn Pitchbook: Amalthea is a startup and King Haggard is a hedge fund.
Getting Informed
First, the title of this issue is a riff on the 40th anniversary of the 1982 animated classic “The Last Unicorn”. ⚠️ Spoiler Alert ⚠️ If you haven’t seen The Last Unicorn, stream it then read this issue of the newsletter.
Next, let’s take a quick rewind to a past issues for what, perhaps, might be the first possible unicorn sighting of Fudge Sunday.
One fun aspect of writing a newsletter is calling back to a prior issue. For example, astute readers of Fudge Sunday may have noted coverage of Helium in Fudge Sunday issue #50.
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Well…
Helium just raised $200M at a $1.2B valuation.🦄
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Admittedly, I don’t know if Helium is the first +$1B+ valuation of a private company (aka unicorn) I’ve mentioned in this newsletter. But if it is, I don’t think it will be the last unicorn.
Now let’s take a look at the road ahead for the growing herds of unicorns.
Guerrilla Marketing Memories: Unicorns
Another fun fact… Years ago I registered two memorable domain names.
unicornjockey.com and unicornjockeys.com
The first domain, unicornjockey.com, was used as a guerrilla marketing redirect to our applicant tracking tool at VCE when we were in blitzscaling mode. What’s cool about having a latent domain name is that I can carry it with me each time I need to remember the deep link URL for referrals like the one I personally use for Faction ( i.e. https://grnh.se/66f4d22d4us )
The second domain, unicornjockeys.com, was registered when I had an idea for a podcast. Essentially, I hoped to interview industry peers at startups that had took a round of investment that represented $1B+ valuations. Of course, being a $1B startup company isn’t as rare as the proverbial unicorn was back then and now there are even decacorns.
In fact, CBInsights tracks a list of private companies and startups with $1B valuations. Yes, it is a very long list.
- Total Number: 1,021
- Total Cumulative Valuation: $3.3T
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And along comes the decacorns…
Decacorns = $10B+ valuation startups
2021 had a year over year doubling for decacorns. While there are far more unicorns, Crunchbase profiled the 30 (new) startups that fit the decacorn description.
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Place your bets on the next count update of this list in the years ahead…
Investors In Decacorn Startups
Crunchbase looked at the investors behind the growing number of decacorns. As you might expect, these investors have become increasingly associated if not synonymous with press coverage of the growing herds of unicorns and decacorns.
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Place your bets on the FTC and SEC
Stampede metaphors aside, when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are in the news there can be implications for the funding ecosystem of unicorns and decacorns. It’s good to pay attention and see what happens next.
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Husbandry, haute école, and ho-hum
And what happens next can also make news in terms of temporal proximity. For example, Tiger Global recently updated investors on their new focus for earlier stage funding which one might argue is a form of late stage large investment anhedonia.
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