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The era of free money is over, and unicorns are paying the price

Alan Murray, Nicholas Gordon
·2 min read

Good morning.

Almost 10 years ago, Fortune famously published a magazine cover with a unicorn dressed in a hoodie. Today, that unicorn returns, but with a twist—it’s a unicorpse. The two covers bookend the last decade—a period in which free money fed a wild herd of startups that measured success by the speed at which they reached billion dollar valuations. But that era has ended, and many unicorns are now paying the price for their growth-at-any-cost approach. Wellcome Trust’s Geoff Love tells Fortune’s Jessica Mathews:

“It’s one thing to fail when you’re a small company and you fail to get product-market fit. It’s quite something else to fail when you are at a valuation in the many billions and have raised hundreds of millions of capital. That’s awful.”

Fortune's cover from February 2015, when running a startup was a lot less stressful, next to our February/March 2024 cover. Cover Illustrations by Jeremy Enecio
Fortune's cover from February 2015, when running a startup was a lot less stressful, next to our February/March 2024 cover. Cover Illustrations by Jeremy Enecio

You can read Jessica’s story and our coverage of dying unicorns here.

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And speaking of corpses, Boeing’s problems keep getting worse. Doors popping out in mid-flight, loose bolts everywhere, wheels falling off on the runway. Can anyone keep these images out of their head when flying? CEO Dave Calhoun deserves credit for his push for transparency. But recognizing that the aircraft manufacturer has a culture problem is only step one. Steps two through 10 are fixing it.

And finally, I talked to Etsy CEO Josh Silverman this week about the company’s new generative AI-powered gift discovery tool. Etsy used ChatGPT to help identify gift buyer personas and come up with appropriate lists of gifts from the 115 million items on the Etsy platform. But it doesn’t ask customers to interact directly with a chat bot. Why? Because consumers aren’t yet ready for that experience, Silverman says. And the computer costs are high. “Computer adoption is going to lag technical capability,” Silverman says.

More news below.


Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com