Why Do Investors Now Talk About Hundred Billion Companies?

Bilal Zuberi says a unicorn is a quaint word now because the target has moved past 10 billion to 100 billion.

Desktop Metal was the first unicorn in the Lux portfolio, only a few years ago. The company went public at a very high valuation, the valuation went down significantly, and then it was sold. The Lux portfolio now has many unicorns. He invested in six, seven, or eight companies there that became unicorns. Friends started saying a company could be worth 10 billion. People told each other not to invest unless a company could be worth at least 5 to 10 billion. When he asks how many 10 billion companies they backed early, the count he gives is zero. The prevailing logic stayed that everybody says 10 billion. Then 10 billion stopped mattering, and the number became 100 billion: the next Stripe, the next Databricks, the next OpenAI, and the next Anthropic.

He calls building the next Stripe, the next Databricks, the next OpenAI, and the next Anthropic trillion-dollar territory. Entry prices of 2 billion, 5 billion, and 10 billion now come with interim markups of 10, 20, 50, and 100 billion, and he leaves open whether the outcome still works.