Since the term has been coined a few years ago, unicorns have become the mythical creature of the venture capital industry: privately held (tech) startups with a valuation of more than a billion dollars. What is a Startup? While indeed extremely rare (about 200 globally), the concept of unicorns helps to clarify what people instinctively mean when they say "Startup" - specially when used as an anglicism in other languages. The most literal definition is a new company. But for that matter, most new companies are restaurants, gas stations and other small business. Or maybe being high-risk? By that definition restaurants qualify as well as many fail within a year. What about being innovative? Most successful innovation is created by large established organizations which have large R&D budgets and who can often attract the top talent in a given field. My favorite definition of a "Startup" is the one by Steve Blank : A startup is an organization formed to se