Assertion Contradicted AI assessment confidence: 98% certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Swartz: Revenue Multiples Are 3x to 5x Above Historical Peaks

Jim Swartz · 20VC: The Memo: Bill Gurley, Doug Leone, Keith Rabois; Investing Lessons from Prior Busts, How Their Investor Psychology Changed, What Can Be Applied To Today's Market · Jun 29, 2022 · at 7:00

Jim Swartz was not on this episode. A recording of them was played into it, so these are their words but not an appearance on 20VC. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.

Jim Swartz, co-founder of Accel, compares 2022 market price-to-revenue multiples to prior historical market peaks across five tech cycles.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.6s

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“If you do a careful analysis of the multiples here in the marketplace, we're at three to five X where we've ever been in our lifetime, price to revenue of companies, three to five X where we were at the peak ever before.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

As of mid-2022, price-to-revenue valuation multiples in the market were three to five times higher than at any previous peak in venture capital history.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

The claim states that as of mid-2022, price-to-revenue valuation multiples were 3x to 5x higher than at any previous historical peak in venture capital history. However, historical data shows the opposite. At the peak of the 2000 dot-com bubble, median tech IPO price-to-sales ratios reached 48.9x to 49.5x, and tech sub-sectors reached 32.4x. Even at the recent late-2021 peak, public SaaS EV/revenue multiples peaked around 18.4x to 19.4x, with top private rounds at 25x to 40x. By mid-2022, following market compression, median public and private software price-to-revenue multiples had fallen to roughly 3.5x to 6.7x. Thus, mid-2022 multiples were a fraction (0.1x to 0.2x) of previous historical peaks, rather than 3x to 5x higher.

At the 2000 dot-com bubble peak, the median price-to-sales ratio for tech IPOs reached 48.9x to 49.5x.
By mid-2022, median public software EV/Revenue multiples had dropped to 5.1x to 6.7x, and private software deal multiples fell to 3.5x to 6x ARR/Revenue.
Mid-2022 price-to-revenue multiples were approximately 0.1x to 0.2x of the 2000 peak and ~0.3x of the late-2021 peak.

Checked against

[1] stachecow.com [2] internationalbanker.com [3] valueaddvc.com [4] cfainstitute.org [5] seekingalpha.com [6] seekingalpha.com [7] millervalue.com [8] amazonaws.com

assessed as of 2026-07-23

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Mentioned

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Assertion Contradicted

Swartz: Tech revenue multiples in 2021 are 3x to 5x historical peaks

“We're at three to five X where we've ever been in our lifetime in terms of price to revenue of companies, three to five X where we were at the peak ever before”

Jim Swartz Nov 8, 2021 ▶ 20:06 20VC Special: Accel Founders Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz on Building Accel Into One of the Most Prominent Venture Firms Over Four Decades, How Today's Market Compares To The Dot Com Bubble, How To Do Generational Transition Well and Why Accel Will Nev

Disclosure

Swartz: Selling high-priced assets expecting an imminent market crash

“Personally, I'm behaving like There's a major crash coming. And so whatever opportunity I have to get out of very high priced assets, I do.”

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Insight

Swartz: 100x revenue valuations are unsustainable and subject to mean reversion

“Everything reverts to the mean at some point. And, you know, a hundred times revenue is just not sustainable.”

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Swartz: Revenue Multiples Are 3x to 5x Above Historical Peaks

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