The era of free money is over, and unicorns are paying the price

“It’s one thing to fail when you’re a small company and you fail to get product-market fit. It’s quite something else to fail when you are at a valuation in the many billions and have raised hundreds of millions of capital. That’s awful.”

Cover Illustrations by Jeremy Enecio

You can read Jessica’s story and our coverage of dying unicorns here.

And speaking of corpses, Boeing’s problems keep getting worse. Doors popping out in mid-flight, loose bolts everywhere, wheels falling off on the runway. Can anyone keep these images out of their head when flying? CEO Dave Calhoun deserves credit for his push for transparency. But recognizing that the aircraft manufacturer has a culture problem is only step one. Steps two through 10 are fixing it.

And finally, I talked to Etsy CEO Josh Silverman this week about the company’s new generative AI-powered gift discovery tool. Etsy used ChatGPT to help identify gift buyer personas and come up with appropriate lists of gifts from the 115 million items on the Etsy platform. But it doesn’t ask customers to interact directly with a chat bot. Why? Because consumers aren’t yet ready for that experience, Silverman says. And the computer costs are high. “Consumer adoption is going to lag technical capability,” Silverman says.

Are we entering the age of “unicorpses?”

Our new magazine issue reveals why newly minted unicorns risk being eclipsed by former high-flying startups gone belly-up. https://t.co/uGsPzuZusu pic.twitter.com/UNILYasOev— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) January 25, 2024

More news below.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

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AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

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Tesla and BYD’s cutthroat EV price war is driving Volvo spinoff Polestar to the precipice—and it may need a lifeline by Christiaan Hetzner

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Ikea is busy cutting prices while everything else gets expensive—and the group’s CEO says it wasn’t ‘rocket science’ to make that call by Prarthana Prakash

Satya Nadella’s triumphant tenure hits a new peak as Microsoft tops $3 trillion in market value—its stock is up 1,006% since he took over by Paolo Confino

This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon. 

Correction, Jan. 25, 2024: This story has been updated to correct Silverman's quote.