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Andy Rubin's Essential Is Now Valued at Over a Billion Dollars Without Shipping a Single Phone (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Essential, the new phone startup from Android founder Andy Rubin, is now a unicorn, according to reports from over the weekend. If you're not up to date on the parlance of Silicon Valley, a unicorn is a company that's valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is no small feat in today's market. This title is even more impressive, given that Essential has yet to ship a single device to consumers. According to a report, Foxconn's FIH Mobile filing for a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company revealed Essential's new unicorn status with a valuation of around $1.2 billion.

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Terminology update: by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    a unicorn is a company that's valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is no small feat in today's market

    Apparently, it now is...

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  2. It takes more to be a unicorn by petes_PoV · · Score: 4, Insightful

    a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company

    That only works on paper and is pretty much irrelevant in the real word. You can't scale up from a 0.25% transaction to expect the same amount of money for a 100% transaction (i.e. selling the company). So this definition of a "unicorn" doesn't hold up. And the paper valuation of the company based on this is bogus.

    If it did work, I would make an absolute packet by selling my brother a one-ten-millionth of a percent share in my company for $1 and then tell the world that I'm a billionaire (less $1).

    Though this sort of silliness goes a long way to explaining financial crashes.

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