Ilya Strebulaev, venture capitalist expert and Professor of Finance at Stanford University, examined data on billion-dollar startups.

Not only the mystical creatures, but also corporate unicorns are subject to myth, legend, and a certain sense of magic. Entrepreneurs and investors alike have been trying to unravel the secrets behind the hype. How can we really measure and assess what drives billion-dollar startups to become extraordinary?

It seems, Prof. Strebulaev tells, this continues to be a challenging quest, since comprehensive data on unicorn startups is sparse. He and his team have made it their mission to intervene. The researchers have been compiling data on every U.S. unicorn since 1995 – including formerly unheard tech firms like Tesla, Uber, and Facebook.

“Every single time a company becomes a unicorn, it gets into my data,” he says.

Strebulaev’s team has been tracking more than 530 unicorns (defined as privately held, venture-backed startups with a reported valuation of $1 billion or more). He first shared his data with his class on VC financing. When students seemed interested, he decided to share his findings to a broader audience.

Onto what we’ve all been waiting for – Strebulaev’s unicorn stats:

• Just under half of all founders were under 40 when their companies became unicorns.
• Almost nine out of ten unicorns have only male founders; Only 1.5% have all female founders.
• 5% of unicorn founders have an MBA degree or equivalent. Fifty-six are college dropouts.
• Nearly 60% of unicorns were headquartered in California when they became unicorns. A third of a typical unicorn’s employees are in California.

However, Strebulaev reminds us to take caution. The data is only descriptive and shouldn’t be used to draw correlations or conclusions. For example, he found that one in 20 unicorn founders went to Stanford, which actually doesn’t mean anything, as he explains. “Because if you take 10,000 venture capital-backed companies, you’ll find out that many of them have a Stanford co-founder.”

But Strebulaev’s research is only in its infancy. His team has gathered data on 150 variables for each company, including information about founders and investors. He plans to continue to release more numbers while he finishes a more detailed study that compares unicorns with other VC-backed firms. When they go up against more ordinary-seeming companies, will unicorns prove to be exceptional?

Some of the team’s previous research suggests a healthy dose of scepticism. In 2017, they showed that many unicorns were drastically overvalued. Some were even found to not be unicorns at all (the gap between some firms’ reported valuation and fair valuation was as much as 196%).

It seems, our fascination with the mythical creatures continues. Still, Strebulaev wants to get to the bottom of things. “I wouldn’t say that I’m really that interested in the unicorns for unicorns’ sake,” he says. “I’m more interested in defining success and factors behind venture capital-backed companies. Unicorns are really only the first step.”

Nobody wants oil any more and yet it is expensive. The dynamics behind it go much further than the war in Ukraine and can drive oil prices to unimagined heights.

In the short term, the war in Ukraine is the driving force. After targets in Ukraine were attacked, the price of oil rose above the $100 mark. There hasn't been a price that high since 2014. Triple-digit oil prices can almost be called extreme prices.

It is too early to assess what the war will mean for the oil price in the medium term. In general, the world cannot do without Russian oil. It is unlikely that there will be sanctions in this area.

To make matters worse, there is also a long-term problem. The last meeting of the OPEC+ countries was enlightening in this respect. Many governments were already worried about the high oil price before the latest developments and called for an increase in production. Not least the USA wants prices at the pump to fall. Coordinated oil reserves were even released in the USA and some other countries to lower the oil price. It has not helped.

What would help is an increase in supply. However, OPEC+ countries are sticking to their plan to increase production only gradually. Even this slow adjustment overtaxes the cartel. Despite higher output, more oil is not necessarily coming out of the ground.

At the last OPEC meeting, a statement was made for the first time. The chairman rebuffed calls for higher output, not because no one should, but because no one really can. OPEC has also underinvested in recent years.

The spare production capacity, estimated at over 5 million barrels per day, seems to be largely non-existent. Because too little has been invested, OPEC can do little about high oil prices. Instead, the finger is pointed at the USA. Shale oil companies there, which have been swing producers in recent years, should produce more.

In the US, shale oil production can be increased quickly, but no one wants to do it. Lessons have been learned from the disaster of 2014-2016. There was a lot of investment back then. Hardly any company was able to show a positive cash flow. A business model that permanently consumes more money than it earns cannot be successful.

Now people are saving. Since oil is a discontinued model in the long term, little is invested. Instead, as much profit as possible is siphoned off to pay dividends and buy back shares. In short, global production capacity is tight and little will change in the short term.

In the future, even oil giants like Exxon and Total will not invest tens of billions. It is about increasing returns and not about growth. Rising oil demand must be met from OPEC+, but even if more is invested now, it can only compensate for falling production volumes in the rest of the world to a limited extent.

The world may thus only be at the beginning of an energy crisis. Such crises happen regularly and are the predictable consequence of too little investment.