Ask HN: How many profitable unicorns are there?

6 pointsFLGMwt4 comments

This is mostly in response a recent Zenefits article that reports $80m under contract but yearly losses of $100m and 1600 employees.

How many of the 80ish public unicorns are profitable?

View on HN

I imagine very few of them are profitable, but a number of them could turn profitable if they chose to slow growth. Just like Amazon is still doing, most of these companies are going to be funneling all the cash they get back into the company to accelerate growth. The question is how many are operating with negative margins that will never be positive (selling a dollar for 90 cents). We’ll probably find out over the next couple years as more Unicorns die.

How are you defining unicorns?

My guess is those with > $1B in valuations

To answer OPs original question, the answer is you can't know for sure.

As interesting as it would be to know, it doesn't really provide any value to even find out the answer anyway.

The common definition used by NYTimes, etc is a startup with a $1 billion in valuation before going public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com