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Finance

Talking the rise and (coming?) fall of tech unicorns

By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
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By
Dan Primack
Dan Primack
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September 18, 2015, 9:51 AM ET
Illustration by Jeremy Enecio for Fortune

Now that the Federal Reserve has chosen to keep short-term interest rates at just an imperceptible tick above zero, the flood of giant startup funding rounds at “unicorn” valuations is expected to continue. But as the rounds continue to pile up, so does the risk of an eventual reckoning.

On Wednesday, I moderated a session at DEMO Traction in Boston that featured Frederic Kerrest, co-founder and COO of cloud identity management company Okta (which recently raised $75 million at a $1.2 billion valuation), and Anand Sanwal, CEO of market research firm CBInsights. Included was a spur-of-the-moment game in which I asked Kerrest and Sanwal to pit the prospects of various unicorns against one another.

View a video of our session below (the “game” is at the 17:45 mark):

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