Sometimes it’s investors who ask for the accounts not to be published. A former CFO of a unicorn tells me that a VC had explicitly asked that the company not publish its accounts, so that its revenue-to-valuation ratio couldn’t be calculated. To protect my source, I can’t give you the figure. But to protect my ego, I can tell you it’s seriously huge.

Because, on the other hand, nobody holds back when it comes to talking up valuations and fundraising. Sometimes even lumping together equity, debt, restructuring and so on. Most of the time, companies don’t announce their valuation openly: they leak it.

All the more so if the company becomes a unicorn. And given the number of unicorns valued at between 1 and 1.2 billion, you can imagine it’s a symbolic threshold chosen purely to have something to announce. Better still, at least 2 companies hailed as unicorns after a funding round weren’t. One of them was €200M short. For the other, the billion was only reached… in dollars.

The status isn’t neutral. In July I wrote a piece about unicorns that might no longer be unicorns. The next morning, the boss of a unicorn wrote to me to defend his company’s unicorn status, a company whose accounts have never been published.

Before signing off:

In that post, he wrote, I was engaging in an activity punishable by law: defamation.

Then he called me later that day.

Two other companies had also contacted me directly to save their horns.

Proof that some figures ought to stay public?