Untamed Unicorns

Why Startup Finance Is Broken and How to Fix It
Corporate law expert Renee Jones shows how a wave of serious startup scandalsincluding FTX, Theranos, WeWork, and Uberwas 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 disciplinemechanisms designed to p