Welcome to the era of $10 billion tech giants

By: Jonathon T.

Get ready, the march of the “decacorns” is coming to Wall Street.

What’s a decacorn? A few short years ago, if you were a private company with a valuation north of $1 billion, you were dubbed a “unicorn.” This new crop of tech darlings have valuations of far more than $10 billion.

Last week kicked off the IPO march with Lyft, the smaller but still massive competitor to Uber that went public at $72 per share and raised approximately $2.2 billion — giving it a market capitalization of about $24 billion.

Uber will be coming to market next month, and is — for now — expected to be valued at $120 billion.

Airbnb, the peer-to-peer lodging platform, is also scheduled to go public this year at a valuation of over $30 billion.

This giant disruptor — funded in 2009 with just $20,000 from Y Combinator — just knocked down the door to the hotel industry.

A $30 billion valuation from $20,000 in 10 short years!

Celebrity-stuffed Casper mattresses plans on going public this year, too. Although it may not be a decacorn — it’s too soon to tell — it is a highly successful unicorn to say the least, and if you buy in, you could be partners with such backers as Ashton Kutcher, 50 Cent and Carmelo Anthony.

WeWork, which recently bought Manhattan’s iconic Lord & Taylor building, is also a decacorn. WeWork was founded in 2010 — just nine years ago — and may be valued at $45 billion to $50 billion.

And then there are Pinterest, Slack, Postmates and Palantir coming down the pike.

This isn’t the ground floor, and investors are buying from some of the smartest people on the planet — the type who knew to put $25,000 into one of these startups and cash it in on an IPO for $250 million.

And I have no problem with that. They took the risks, they created and they delivered — providing hundreds of thousands of new economy jobs in the process.

Congratulations!