[WanderPanda]

> Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: United States (136), China (120), India (26), UK (15), South Korea (11), Israel (7), Indonesia (6), Singapore (4), Switzerland (4), Hong Kong (4), France (3), Portugal (3), Sweden (3), Australia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Luxembourg (2), Spain (2), Ukraine (2) and ten other countries (1 each)

Israel has more than 3x more unicorns than we in Germany that tells one thing or two...

[yorwba]

Using unicorns as a proxy for innovation is maybe not a great idea, because it's just looking at a few outliers of heavily concentrated capital. It doesn't tell you anything about the majority of companies that are not unicorns and will never be, but that might nonetheless be highly innovative and profitable.

For example, if you look at foreign direct investment, the Netherlands lead the pack in 2017 with $4.888 trillion invested by residents of other countries. [1] Yet apparently there's only one Dutch unicorn (team.blue). Evidently there's a lot of investment going to other companies instead of betting on a single unicorn.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[romanoderoma]

It tells us that Israel have the same industrial military complex that US have

Put it in another way: their success is due military application of technology

Besides: what does counting unicorns proves?

Is Israel GDP per capita higher than Germany?

Is Israel richer than Germany?

Europe values other metrics more than simply pure market valuation

For example WhatsApp only employed 50 engineers when already had 900 million users

In Germany, and Europe in general, we prefer businesses that increase the general population employment than pure profit margins

EDIT:

a few resources about military industrial complex in Israel

https://medium.com/@davidsperorn/a-match-made-in-hell-israel...

https://www.tni.org/es/node/13511

https://www.jstor.org/stable/174246

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239830843716...

[dmitriid]

Among unicorns are:

- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly

- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws

- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes

- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams

- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget

- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures

etc.

There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".