Startup Valuation

“Well that doesn't work from a venture perspective. Like with those kinds of, you'd never get the venture returns. You can't invest in things. When the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're gonna, a small portfolio that's got lik…”

“Then I think over that 12 months, really try and maximize and push your business to scale the revenue as much as you can, because How much it scales in that 12 months, even if it grows, like, you know, 2030, 40%, like, that can massively increase your valuatio…”

“Especially with capital being so constrained right now, you know, that those days of Frothy valuations are kind of over.”

“Valuations represent discounted future expectations. And so, you've, you may feel like you've won a prize, but you've really increased everyone's expectation for what this company can achieve. And in order to raise that up around from here, it's way harder tha…”

“So I'm not trying to aim, like get the highest valuation possible. I think it's dangerous and what we've seen in the past couple of years that it can lead to down rounds and those are really annoying or unmotivating to people.”

“In the black and white of the tax proposal, what they say is that the valuation of the startup for the purpose of calculating the gain is the greater of a number of options, but the, specifically the last round valuation.”

“But if you look at the, if you look at the data, it's actually not signaling risk, it's signaling advantage. And it's signaling advantage in the sense that the average valuation for the round that you raise after your Sequoia round. So if you raise a seed from…”

“Startup valuation is literally a made up number. What I mean by that is that, you know, venture capitalists or people who want to buy your company in the early stages, based on fear of losing the deal, will literally make up a number. That is, you know, valuat…”

“Down rounds are not problematic. Much more problematic, again, are valuations that that are essentially in exit territory, or far in excess of exit territory. It's really hard to recover from that.”

“A lot of valuations will still crash from here dramatically. And there's probably going to be huge layoffs going into Q one, Q two as well.”

“Valuation to me can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic For future potential cash flows, right? But valuations now are a measure of what that markets FOMO is for that business.”

“I do think the market will normalize this year. It's already had a bit of a correction. And I think when I say normalize, I think it's been pretty stable. Like buyers like myself have kind of had a formula for how much we evaluate a company for a while. But th…”

“We will see a correction. I just don't believe it's going to be a sudden correction that will feel like a sort of bubble burst. I think it'll be, you know, more pressure for keeping valuations in some reasonable band that still, compared to 15 years ago, will …”

“The exits are so much bigger today, the markets are so much bigger, and there's a lot of opportunity, I think, that justifies these bigger valuations, even in the context of this inflation.”

“Typically filing for a patent application, even before it's granted as an, you know, before it becomes an issue, patent will add a million dollars to the valuation of a startup.”

“A lot of companies won't succeed because people hold on artificially to prices that are too high.”

“Lower valuations. Just think a lot of companies are getting themselves into situations that are going to be very hard to get out of. So I think hip checking the valuations probably wouldn't hurt.”

“The way it works is your fund has a strategy and you say to yourself, do I want to invest in this company? And if I want to invest in this company, then I have a check size. And the check size is usually determined by the fund size, because again, back to our …”

“That trend is not going to last forever. This boom economy is not going to last forever. Everything's cyclical. I've worked through two recessions so far, and you know, it's going to come back down.”

“For me to worry about the difference between 10,000,020 million valuations seems like such a myopic view of the fact that technology is working, and it's disruptive, and the market is like basically the globe.”

“There was one mistake that was really basically impossible to fix, and it was raising too much money at too high of a valuation”

“Go get a high valuation. I think it's one of the most detrimental things that happens for these young entrepreneurs. They think it's a game. And the answer is not about just because you can get away with it. You know, you should go get a high valuation. You sh…”

“The prices that the market will bear now are about 50% lower than they were when we fundraised.”

“I think that they've actually started to rationalize a little bit more.”

“Most startups do fail, and you need to make sure that the startups that you do succeed with actually help to cover all the losses that you make otherwise, and if you invest at way too high a price, you're not going to cover all the other failures that you have…”

“While we were going through, there was a number that was floating around, like it's like two to three X of the standard valuation. So it definitely, it has a huge impact on your valuation because also like everybody has been pre-vetted so rigorously.”