The Silicon Valley tech boom is much larger than when the Dot-com bubble began to burst when the NASDAQ Composite Stock Market Index peaked at 5,057 during the Jupiter-Neptune square alignment that correlates with periods extreme growth, economic bubbles, excessive market speculation, and optimism.
A unicorn is a privately held startup company that is valued at $1 billion or greater. Many of the Silicon Valley startups founded between 2010 and 2017 were growing in valuation twice as fast as companies from startups founded between 2000 and 2013. The largest and most valuable unicorn company is Uber Technologies, Inc. a peer-to-peer ridesharing, food delivery, and transportation network company headquartered in downtown San Francisco, California.
- Uber, formerly known as UberCab, is a car-sharing, transportation network company that lets the consumers use its mobile app to order a car to transport them to another location (like a taxi service). Uber services are active in a total of 81 countries and 581 cities around the world.
- Current Valuation: $69 Billion (December 2017)
- Total Equity Funding: $10.7 Billion
- Founding Date: March 4th, 2009
- Founders: Garrett Camp, Oscar Salazar, Travis Kalanick
- Market: Transportation
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Since 2009, these unicorn start-ups (e.g. Uber), valued at $1 billion or more, have been able to access vast amounts of venture capital from Wall Street institutional investors, hedge funds, and mutual funds without ever producing a profit. The age of the unicorn in Silicon Valley peaked a few years ago. In 2014 there were 42 new unicorn companies in the United States; in 2015 there were 43. In 2017, only 33 new U.S. companies achieved unicorn status. This year, there are only 11 new unicorns as of May 15th, with fewer new unicorn companies being created.
As of late 2018, 279 unicorns with a cumulative value of $ 1 trillion exist. Some familiar U.S. based unicorns, besides Uber, include Airbnb, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, WeWork, and Pinterest. China claims a number of unicorns as well, including Didi Chuxing, Xiaomi, China Internet Plus Holding (Meituan Dianping) and Lu.com.
Industry professionals seem well versed in the valuation distinctions believe that unicorn companies are overvalued by as much as 50 percent, and have moved into a world that is both speculatively unsustainable since and higher interest rates and the return of market volatility are increasing this year. The truth is, with unicorns being so overvalued, it will not take long for Wall Street venture capital to discover this fact.
The Prime Unicorn Index, a weighted price return index that measures the share price performance of U.S. private companies valued at $500 million. The Index is an equally-weighted price return. By being equally-weighted, this prevents companies like Uber or SpaceX from having a biased impact on the Index price. The Index clearly shows that unicorn growth levels, along with valuations, have been pumped up to unsustainable levels since June of 2011.
The Partial Solar Eclipse – Jul 12, 2018, will make a direct hit to the Venus-Jupiter-Pluto T-Square natal configuration in the Prime Unicorn Index horoscope, auguring a period of reckoning to come for the startup funding bubble in the second half of 2018 into 2019. Therefore, Unicorn companies soon will no longer be able to meander along, burning through massive private capital and money, and if they do rush an IPO, after dragging their feet for an average of 11 years, the outlook will be very bleak. The busting of the unicorn bubble will be a new kind of failure that Silicon Valley will have to come to grips with.
