In the large field of startup send-up and parody, a new entry, Unicorn Startup Simulator feels like a rare breed, in that it's so bizarre and fun. The goal of the game, naturally, is to reach a $1 billion valuation in one year before going public — the unicorn threshold — achieved, as in life, by making simple, binary decisions that become increasingly weird.

Questions like "Should you spring for a catering service?" quickly devolve into "should you have a tech reporter who bashed your company killed?" In between are a seemingly endless array of ways to fail and die penniless and ruined, usually in your mother's basement, or driving for Uber again, or taunted in other such ways by the game. It's tough to know what to do when you're bootstrapping a company, so you'll be forgiven if you blow your $1.06 billion valuation in the game because you chose "say no to drugs" over "pass that dutchie" at an office celebration of some new milestone.

Of course — prepare yourself for a little bit of startup-ception — the Unicorn Startup Simulator is, at least in part, a bit of marketing from an Estonian online time-tracking startup called Toggl.

"We created [the simulator] with the people behind the Toggl time tracking app during a team retreat in the fine town of North Berwick, Scotland," explains Mart Virkus, a marketing lead at Toggl who also draws comics about video games, technology, and culture at Arcade Rage. If you play his game enough times, you'll even notice that he gives himself a very meta-nod within the game:

"For us, it was a way to do something a little different from our daily jobs," Virkus writes, describing the game as "like the Farming Simulator for the Millennial generation."

Even if it's impossible to lose your real-life funding just by playing, you definitely stand to blow a whole afternoon on this game. My central confusion in trying to win — which I couldn't, but SFist's Jay Barmann did — has been this: Should you do what's morally right to succeed, or does the game have a darker take on Silicon Valley, whereby you'll succeed by moving fast, breaking things, and generally cutting corners? Our initial testing indicates you need to be pretty morally flexible, not bend over backwards for customers, and do what you can to keep your employees happy, within reason, unless they want to work remotely from Bangkok. You should play and find out.

Related: Nerd Alert: First Trailer For 'Silicon Valley' Season 4

Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of blood testing startup Theranos, has had a rough year. News broke in April that the company, which she founded, was under criminal investigation and an SEC probe for potentially misleading investors. And now, in an almost comical reminder that wealth is often an illusion in Silicon Valley, Forbes has reduced its estimation of Holmes's net worth from $4.5 billion earlier this year to $0.00. Yep. Zero dollars.

Just how does the magazine figure Homles is now $4.5 billion dollars poorer than she was last year? Well, to start, it claims her company is worth way less than the last funding round would suggest — pegging the actual value at $800 million (which, hey, not bad!).

"That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724 million it has raised according to VC Experts, a research firm, even though some of that has already been spent on building labs and on research," explains Forbes. "It also represents a generous multiple on the company's sales. Theranos' investors have preferred shares, which means that at FORBES' current estimated valuation they'll get their money back before Holmes, who owns common shares, gets a cent."

In other words, Holmes's 50 percent ownership of the company isn't worth a dime as of now. Ouch.

Related: Blood Testing Startup Theranos Is Now Under Criminal Investigation, SEC Probe
CEO Of Healthcare Startup Theranos Faces 2-Year Ban From Blood Testing Biz
Health Regulators Investigating Complaints Against Healthcare Startup Theranos From Former Employees

Marc Benioff, billionaire philanthropist and noted unicorn skeptic, said last year that “The unicorn mania that’s going on, that’s dangerous for our Silicon Valley economy." As opposed to crazytalk private investments and long holdouts for IPOs, the public could be brought in earlier to "rationalize" the real value of companies. "There's no reason [for] these companies who claim to be worth billions of dollars and making billions of dollars to stay in the private markets," Benioff added.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick disagrees. Don't count on an IPO anytime soon for his groundbreaking contractor-based, taxi-dispatching "technology" company, a notably leaky ship that's losing money as fast as it grows.

As Kalanick told CNBC, "I'm going to make sure [an IPO] happens as late as possible."

Why the delay? Nothing to do with losses: Kalanick sees the market — the public, not his investors, not his business aspirations — as "irrational," even bubbly.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle an Uber.

"What I like to say when you get into something that feels like a bubble or, at least, feels irrational is that you still want to build a company that has a strong discipline business building culture," Kalanick solemnly swore.

"I call it the moral obligation with investors who put money in, they need to see liquidity and of course we have employees as well who put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make Uber successful and they own equity and so have to ultimately find liquidity for all shareholders."

Uber raised $10 billion in the past 18 months, and investors who hoped to turn their magical unicorn investment dollars into cold hard American cash through the crucible of an IPO might see the obligation another way.

In a moment of honesty, Kalanick added that he is terrible at PR.

"I'm an engineer by trade, and what engineers do is they go and build, and they don't think a lot about storytelling... What I've learned as we've gotten bigger is that it's really, really important for us to take all the opportunities to tell our story, because as we grow and have a bigger impact on cities, if we don't tell our story somebody else will."

You know, like the "irrational" public.

Related: Amid Massive Losses, Thirsty Uber Gambles On Lower Prices, Higher Volume

In a survey of 929 tech and healthcare startup executives, Silicon Valley Bank has made a shocking discovery. Just 64 percent felt business conditions would improve this year, writes Wired, representing an 18 percent drop off in expectations from the past two years.

Furthermore, "This survey was done in December, and we saw an even more dramatic change in January and February as we were talking to our clients,” Silicon Valley Bank CEO and president Greg Becker said. “They’re assuming things are going to get more difficult.”

If optimism is the main metric by which Silicon Valley has been so far measured, this crisis of confidence might be seen as a sort of crash. So what could it mean for that rarest of breeds, the privately financed, billion dollar valuation "unicorn?"

In December, angelic investor type Marc Benioff cast aspersions on "unicorn mania", calling the Valley's fixation on high-valuations and going public a liability. Well, Benioffs' fears might be assuaged. The reign of the unicorn could well be behind us.

"We’ve had so many years of expansion and access to capital,” says Becker. “This year you’ll see more of these companies return to their natural levels.” One definition of normal: Wired observes that "instead of focusing on growth at all costs, as many start-ups have done in recent years, executives say they plan to work toward profitability." Wha??

But what of the all-powerful IPO — the gold ring of startupdom? “The vast majority of companies—maybe 90-95 percent—get acquired at the end of the day,” Becker adds. That doesn't sound very magical to me — sort of realistic, even?

Related: Marc Benioff: 'Unicorn Mania' Is 'Dangerous For Our Silicon Valley Economy'

Even those who subscribe to tech luminary Marc Benioff's view that “unicorn mania.. [is] dangerous for our Silicon Valley economy," a warning he issued in a recent interview, are sure to marvel at a brand new and totally invaluable local specimen — From 1505-6.

The innovative work Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn by the famous painter Raphael depicts an angelic investor-type and her unique prize, which at the time would have been a typical symbol of chastity and modesty, rather than, you know, ebullient and speculative private investment.

The exhibition “Sublime Beauty,” at the Legion of Honor opened this past Saturday and, in a bold portfolio move, is just a single painting "grandly presented in its own ample room" in the words of the Chronicle.

A symbol of a renaissance that will resonate with locals who liken San Francisco to Florence during that period, Raphael's work is more than two feet in height and has gained flattering comparisons to Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa."

Dr. Esther Bell, curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, says that "'Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn' is a stunning masterpiece of the Italian High Renaissance." She added that its arrival was greeted "with new scholarship as well as a celebration fitting for the blond beauty and her mysterious unicorn."

Interestingly, scholars have uncovered that the unicorn may have originally been painted as a puppy — which, okay, but good pivot Raphael, because the puppy art market has always been a little crowded.

Previously: 'The Hunt For The Unicorn Company' As Told In Medieval Tapestries

Salesforce CEO and billionaire philanthropist Marc Benioff isn't showing a lot of charity to privately funded startups valued at $1 billion or more before being taken public, a group colloquially named unicorns.

“The unicorn mania that’s going on, that’s dangerous for our Silicon Valley economy," Benioff said to Bloomberg TV. Instead, says Benioff, the model should incorporate a public that can "rationalize" these companies' values.

I know this is a bit of a hobby-horse, but that goddamn name — unicorns — is so non-ironically employed that it's become deeply ironic. Unicorns are either a) 100 percent mythical and zero percent real, or according to lore, b) doomed to extinction. Guess we'll have to wait and see, right Marc?

“I don’t think a day goes by today that I don’t get a call of a company raising money at a billion dollars or more," said Benioff, who probably does take a lot of calls. "And this is just, you know, unheard of... It’s become a self-esteem issue for these entrepreneurs.”

To wit, Techcrunch's handy, gamified Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard includes 156 companies. But in a perversion of nature, the more of these things there are, the more endangered they might actually be. They can't all be worth it, the logic goes, and their rarity and novelty are wearing thin as more appear.

The thrust, as it were, of Benioff's argument is this, as quoted in the Business Times: "There's no reason [for] these companies who claim to be worth billions of dollars and making billions of dollars to stay in the private markets."

Recently I heard Netflix CEO Reed Hastings voice a similar sentiment. Going public, he said, was like finally having sex. You're going to be bad — at sex I guess he meant, which maybe by his analogy is having a company that makes money — until you stop thinking about it and start doing it. It was actually a very funny, somewhat self-aware analogy, but yeah it was pretty bro-y in retrospect.

Famed VC Jon Doerr shared similar feelings to Benioff's with the Business Times earlier this month. “Google has acquired one company per week since 2010, but has only five times paid more than a billion dollars for a company,” Doerr said. “There are 150 companies considered unicorns, 93 are in the United States. How does that math work?” Twisting the knife, he channeled Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," quipping, "Unicorns may be more of an albatross."

Or wouldn't that be albatrosses?

Related: 'The Hunt For The Unicorn Company' As Told In Medieval Tapestries

Jack Dorsey developed Square's signature card reader and made waves in the mobile payments world after he was removed from Twitter in 2008. It's been a rocky ride since, but as the Verge notes, the company processed $23.8 billion in payments last year alone, which is nothing to cough at. Now Dorsey is back on top at Twitter while still helming Square, which today became a publicly traded company. What an exciting time for them! Maybe a little too exciting.

Among investors and in the media, the market's reaction has become a referendum on the whole of the Wall Street Journal's not-so-exclusive unicorn society, a term that refers to businesses valued at $1 billion or more before an IPO. Could they be over-valued? That's between them and the gods of the marketplace.

As Wired pundits point out, the company's eventual $9 share price is below the $11 to $13 range Square proposed and very much at odds with the $15.46 price per share private investors paid during an investment round last year. Indeed, at that $9 price, Square's market cap is $2.9 billion, which the the Business Times calls "painful."

But it doesn't look so terrible in the light of day. Venturebeat is keeping score, and have it that trading began at $11.20 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, with the stock up 42 percent from market open and rising a bit.

New York Magazine's analysis: this "shows why this tech bubble is different, and less dangerous, than the last one."

How many would be worth less than the valuation last given to them by private investors? Back in the bubbly days of the late 1990s, the answers to those two questions would probably have been “all” and “none.” Companies took private money, built a business, and rushed to the public markets, with their shares often surging to irrational values as soon as they hit the exchanges, meaning big paydays for early funders.

Wired tells a bit of a different story, more of the all-or-nothing one NY Mag is avoiding, with a URL indicating an "end time" for unicorns. Specifically, they cite the "ratchet" arrangement, a protection for late investors, as a poor omen.

The arrangement puts early stage investors and even early employees at a distinct disadvantage compared to late stage investors, who are guaranteed a payout no matter the outcome. Viewed that way, it’s hard not to see these deals as a product of an environment in which private companies are drastically overvalued. Even as they drive private company valuations higher and higher, these heavyweight investors are simultaneously hedging their bets, negotiating safety nets to protect themselves when a company’s public offering inevitably disappoints.

If you're looking for a piece of the action yourself, Square is now trading under the ticker symbol “SQ.” Buy! Sell! You tell Square what you think it's worth.

Previously: Jack Dorsey Giving Half His Square Equity To New Foundation Helping Ferguson, MO

Hanging today in The Cloisters of New York, The Hunt for the Unicorn Company is perhaps the most famous series of tapestries in human history, numbering seven in total, six of which survive in full. Likely designed in Paris but woven in either Brussels or Liège from 1495 to 1505, they consist of metallic threads, silk, and wool. Their still vibrant colors are the product of dye plants.

As the tapestries demonstrate, the hunt for a tech "unicorn" — a mythical company with magically high valuation before its initial public offering — has been ongoing for centuries. Thematically central to the tapestries' capitalist allegory is the invincibility of the magical unicorn entity, which wields power and potential profitability beyond mortal measure, but which is roughly calculated to exceed $1 billion dollars, contemporary U.S.

Simultaneously, of course, the unicorn's capture is acknowledged through artifice as fantastical: A feat perhaps best left to weavers and their dreaming.

"The Hunt for the Unicorn Company" tapestries were owned by the La Rochefoucauld family of France for several centuries, first noted in a 1728 inventory. They survived the French Revolution and in the 20th century were purchased by noted angel investor John D. Rockefeller, who hung them in his own castle before donating them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938.

In the first tapestry above, "The Hunters Enter the Woods," nobleman and venture capitalists (these are of course all men despite their long hair fashions) steel themselves to search for their target. Their fortune and fame — their very portfolios — depend on the hunt.

In this tapestry, the unicorn company kneels before a tall white fountain, representing bountiful revenue streams, with pheasants and goldfinches hanging on its ledge, their pairs signifying procreation and scalability.

The Unicorn is Attacked

To deliver acceptable returns on the hunt, the assembled party relies on a limited number of spears and weapons, rendering crucial the magical billion dollar threshold the unicorn represents.

The Unicorn Is Nearly Sodomized As It Defends Itself

Often, however, the creature can prove difficult to tame, driven near-mad by the bilious forces of market speculation. Indeed, its very disruptiveness, the source of its perceived power, makes the unicorn a wild, unpredictable animal.

The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle

Eventually, at least in the realm of the imagination, the unicorn is slain — this is known as the "exit." The unicorn is then brought to the castle, an allegory for the market.

The Unicorn is in Captivity and No Longer Dead

The unicorn's death, of course, is a temporary martyrdom. Revived in the captive hands of shareholders, it is tamed, reigned in, and fed from a tree of pomegranates, a common representation of fertility, revenue, and growth.

As works of art, The Hunt for the Unicorn Company tapestries have an inestimable value. Although in this market, would it hurt them to be a little more accessible, or maybe at least get some banner ads?

Previously: Uber Investor: The Bay Area Bubble Will Pop This Year, And More Than Tech Will Suffer

This year's Castro Street Fair poster features a cartoon unicorn, blue skies, and rainbows. However, the original poster had a unicorn sporting a penis and testicles. Delightful! It has since been censored. Alas. But now, for your mildly NSF-ish viewing pleasure, we present to you the uncensored version of the poster.

[via Le Fag]

Magic-believing crazy person Pope Benedict XVI announced today a brand spanking new Bishop. Salvatore Joseph Cordileone has officially been announced as America's Next Top Bishop of Oakland, "making him the principal voice of moral authority for some 400,000 Catholics in Alameda and Contra Costa counties." According to SF Chronicle, Cordileone, 52, was the auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of San Diego. Bishop Cordileone, we must admit, looks kind of sexy for someone at such an advanced age. We would not at all have minded him touching our bathing suit area while giving us "private communion classes" as a kid. Congratulations, Joe!

Also, Cordileone "inherits a diocese that has staked some $190 million on a new Cathedral in downtown Oakland." $190 million on what's basically a mystery house? $190 million?! Disgusting. At least throw in a few lofts, a Quizno's, or something; otherwise, see you in Hell.