Many investors in unicorns had bet that a new generation of technology firms would unsettle the old guard, but that has not happened as quickly as they had predicted. Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook have continued to grow impressively, especially considering their already large size; and they have been adept at entering new markets that startups might otherwise have claimed. For example, Facebook has bought and built messaging apps that compete with Snapchat, and Dropbox has a rival in Amazon, whose cloud-storage business is large and growing quickly. Compared with most profitless startups, the big firms are not outrageously valued. It may become clearer to investors that they not only overestimated the unicorns but underestimated the incumbent firms’ growth prospects.
