1 in 40M Odds of Being a Space Unicorn

The other day while George and I were editing an article “$3.5M Dollars — The True Cost of Launching Space Startups,” we got to the section about what it takes to be a Space Unicorn. Space meaning a Founder in The Space Economy, aka Spacepreneur. You could call them “Astroneurs” but that's more of a late 1990s term than 21st century nomenclature for the entrepreneurs of space.

At any rate, we got around to calculating the odds of being a Unicorn. Unicorn not meaning horned horse with wings (though not all unicorns have horns and technically rhinoceros are just confidently plump unicorns). Rather, unicorns meaning startups worth over $1 billion.

So we did the math and the odds of being a Space Unicorn are 1 in 40 million.

• Fewer than 1% of startups get VC money.
• Only 1 in 40 VC-funded companies become unicorns.
• 1 in 10,000 companies are space or space related.

Accounting for bias towards tech investments (2.5*10^(-8) to 1) that gets you to about 1 in 40M odds. Which is way better than your 1 in 300M odds of winning the Mega-Millions lottery.

So there you have it. The odds of being a space / aerospace unicorn are about 8.5 times better than winning the Mega-Millions lottery. Not too shabby.