Dear Tom,

It's an interesting observation, and I hope you are able to more definitively trace it. I too had noticed an uptick in the usage this spring. Ben Zimmer did a short article on the phrase in the Wall Street Journal on March 20th ("How ‘Unicorns’ Became Silicon Valley Companies") but there are no conclusions or potential origins beyond what you already noted. 

You're right to note the shift in meaning -- unicorns in this context are not mythological, but something exceedingly uncommon. No implication that actually locating a unicorn is futile, akin to Sir Pellinore's quest. 

For what it's worth, I noticed a tendency to employ that particular word in 2014 media accounts of female engineers and tech executives describing their encounters with sexism in a male-dominated Silicon Valley. Interestingly enough, I distinctly recall women engineers describing their statuses in startups as "unicorns." The term seems to be floating around the IT industry in a few different contexts. 

--Andrew

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Andrew Meade McGee
Corcoran Department of History
University of Virginia
PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22904

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 12:23 AM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:
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> Dear SIGCIS,
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> To raise a question that may or may not turn out to have an explanation within our domain of expertise, I’ve been struck recently by frequent references to “unicorns” in the business press. This crystalized over breakfast last week when I noticed an article “Stockholm: The Unicorn Factory” in my usually reserved Financial Times.
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> Apparently the consensus definition of a “unicorn” in this context is a newish company worth more than $1 billion. Stockholm has more per capita than anywhere but Silicon Valley. A total output of five sounds more like an atelier than a factory, and unicorns probably come from unicorn farms rather than assembly lines, but that’s not really the point.
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> The point is: unicorns are not just vanishingly rare. They’re mythical. Until recently, if someone told me I was pursuing a unicorn I’d have assumed they meant I was wasting my time. So where does the metaphor come from? Something that’s very rare but very valuable might be worth pursuing. Something that is flat-out imaginary seems a bad goal for investment dollars or public policy.
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> Is this something to do with the popularity of fantasy literature in the tech field? Did it start as some kind of joke and get out of hand? A quick Google search suggests that it was popularized with http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/, which offers no particular justification for the term beyond “to us, it means something extremely rare, and magical.”
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> Tom
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> _______________________________________________
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