Untamed Unicorns : Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It

Corporate law expert Renee Jones shows how a wave of serious startup scandals—including FTX, Theranos, WeWork, and Uber—was enabled by financial deregulation that allows startups to grow to enormous size without going public. The result: a slew of corporate behemoths shielded from traditional legal mechanisms for deterring corporate wrongdoing.

The definitive account of the harms that have come from deregulating venture capital financing and allowing startups to become gigantic while remaining private. The term “unicorn” for a private startup company worth $1 billion or more was coined to emphasize the rarity of such ventures. But today there are more than 1,500 of them, with a combined valuation of over $4 trillion. By remaining private, these corporate behemoths shield themselves from disclosure requirements, investor oversight, and market discipline—mechanisms designed to protect investors and the public from corporate wrongdoing. It’s no coincidence that in recent years, a number of prominent startups have been the sites of founder misconduct and fraud. This wave of startup scandals exposes significant problems with the venture capital financing model and the deregulation that helped fuel the industry’s explosive growth. Untamed Unicorns connects the most dramatic startup scandals, including FTX, Theranos, WeWork, and Uber, to structural flaws in the startup financing model. Detailing the deregulatory reforms implemented by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past 40 years, it shows how these have eroded core safeguards of securities law that were first established during the New Deal era. As Renée Jones makes clear, allowing unicorn companies to run wild doesn’t threaten only the sophisticated venture capitalists who finance Silicon Valley. When the largest startups go awry, the consequences are often severe for ordinary investors, employees, and the public at large. Revealing the risks inherent in the current system, Untamed Unicorns presents a roadmap for reform to restore proper boundaries between public and private securities markets.