Once upon a time, there were no unicorns. Well, maybe in fairy tales, where the “once upon a time” usually starts off the story, but quite rarely in business, where the term is mostly found these days. “Unicorn” is the colloquial expression describing companies — more specifically startups — valued at or above 1 billion dollars. Which is not bad when you think about it (at least when I think about it).

Obviously, the implied notion when using the word “unicorn” to qualify a startup is that there are very few of those — next to none, actually. However, and this is where it becomes interesting, reading any tech blog for a couple of days will show you that they are actually far from mythical — that there are indeed a bunch of unicorns roaming the earth or, rather, California.

Naturally, there are two ways to interpret such a trend:

• the optimistic, possibly short-sighted way: this is a sign that it’s never been easier to develop a startup, meaning any good idea can get funded, meaning you can get funded, meaning innovation and new products will flourish, economic growth will follow and we will all be using driverless cars, eating Soylent (or Joylent in Europe) and working virtually by the next soccer world cup (2018, FYI).
• the less optimistic to downright gloomy way: this means we are currently witnessing the accelerating rise of a new tech bubble, with increasingly irrealistic valuations, artificial company growth — and an upcoming massive burst when this all becomes evident, complete with dozens of startups closing shop, (dozens of) thousands of employees losing their jobs, and even the death of some of those unicorns.

The truth is quite likely a mix of those two visions: the market is very probably becoming overvalued and will more or less violently self-adjust in the next few years, but, in the mean time, it allows — and will somewhat continue to allow — funding and development of a growing number of exciting projects which will ultimately change the way we live.

This is how innovation cycles work: first a slow rise, then a quicker rise, then a burst, then a lull, then a slow rise… Right now, we are quite clearly somewhere in phase 2. Which is not a bad time to be in — especially if you are an entrepreneur looking for funding. But we all know, on some level, that this remarkable growth rhythm cannot last forever and that there will be a correction.

However, and this clearly puts me in the ranks of the optimists, I believe that the inevitable upcoming burst will not be as violent as the previous, meaning it won’t annihilate as many startups as deeply as it did before. In other terms, overall innovation and global economic equilibrium keeps rising. In yet other terms, in the long run, we are all fine.