Valuation

“I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity for innovation in, in automation around valuations, leveraging AI plus benchmarks, plus proprietary company data, as well as Public market comps and other.”

“And so I do think we're going to see my guess is that we see a little bit of a reckoning on some of these crazy valuations on some of these companies that are again, just glorified chat GPT rappers. So I think we'll see a little bit of a crash on some of those…”

“Valuation is a lot more important for companies that have been around for a long time than a brand new entrant to the public markets.”

“Once they get good, the valuation skyrocket so fast that like you could still get good multiples, but they're just much lower than it, you know, early stages.”

“I do think we will see a collapse in valuations. Most likely. You can't never be certain.”

“It's the tough conversations happen a little bit late, and those tough conversations are about exit, and they're about control, and they're not often about valuation. Those conversations get solved really quickly, and folks think, oh, we're done. We've got our…”

“The really strong deals your A deals in the market are really competitive right now. And so, you know, valuations are back to in some cases where we were in kind of 20, 21, 22. And so those are just, those aren't a great fit for us either.”

“Companies that have the word AI attached to them, their valuations are I don't want to use superlatives, but the valuations are quite high, right, from a multiple perspective, from what they're delivering.”

“The number one thing for founders, right? No matter what your brand is, how much value you have, whatever you do, the valuation matters, what price you're giving them money at, how much ownership you're taking. That is the first priority for them. Everything e…”

“There are definitely certain funds that come to mind that I won't name who have decided the strategy that they're going to employ is to use valuation as a lever to win.”

“A five million dollar ARR software company that's growing at 25% a year versus a ten million dollar ARR software company growing at 25% a year. The ten million dollar company is probably going to be valued at four or five times what the five million ARR is bec…”

“Like being a disciplined investor doesn't mean I will never pay more than X multiple, because when you find a really special company, you should lean into valuation. Now, the danger is that you can tell yourself a story that every company is a special company,…”

“I also think you should not wait for a lead. And you should just set terms and pull people in like one-on-one. Increase the valuation as you go along. Because as you need money less, you can increase that valuation.”

“Being anchored on a price that's unrealistically low can be just as dangerous to a business as being anchored on a price that's too high.”

“Also, if you think about payback period, if you look at top quartile SaaS companies versus bottom quartile, top quartile have three X shorter payback period than the bottom quartile and seven X higher valuation.”

“Every three percent increase in net revenue retention doubles the company's valuation.”

“If you push valuations as high as possible, investors are going to put control provisions in there that sort of says, okay, look, the reason why we're giving you this high valuation is because you're saying you're gunning for this enormous outcome. So we're go…”

“When the employees know that the valuation isn't realistic, I think really hurts the morale and hurts the ability of the company to kind of do its best work.”

“In fact, valuations at Series A ticket sizes have increased 42% in the last two years.”

“They expect their valuations to be the same as in 2023 and the same as in 2022.”

“Now we're seeing companies, you know, five million revenue in AI revenue, and they're raising at five, six, seven hundred million valuation. That's price to perfection, right? We're talking about a hundred X multiple sometimes in these cases.”

“If you want to cost ten billion, we probably should achieve six hundred million in revenue and then show profitability and continue growing with the same pace.”

“The valuation was, like, close to sixty million.”

“Always saying the highest price is almost certainly going to be a mistake.”

“When an investor asks, how much are you raising? More often than not, they're actually asking, how much do you think you're worth? Let's start the negotiation on valuation right now, because a 20% is what they want.”

“I think it's fair to give on valuation.”

“Every company's valuation, whether it's a startup or a public company or even a bond, is a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.”

“My theory in crypto now is selling is less to do with price levels. Like in the public markets, people will hold a stock and they're like, okay, if this ever gets overvalued, I'm selling, I'm trimming the position. In crypto, it's much more cyclical. And so I …”

“I'm not surprised that Reddit's going out at the valuation they're going out at, because I see it play out in real life in a way that's absolutely skyrocketing.”

“If you have one buyer, you have no buyers and it gets very fascinating. And this is how you increase valuation or get better terms is you have multiple buyers cause you have leverage.”

“Cash flow over valuation any day of the week. What I mean by that is, who cares if a venture fund is going to say your business is worth a billion dollars? It feels nice. But building cash flowing businesses is ultimately a huge reward from a financial standpo…”

“I think this is an interesting question because my answer is oftentimes price doesn't matter unless you're off by five X, in which case then price is the only thing that matters.”

“Higher valuation, given the same company quality, is always worse.”

“I think the number one thing a founder can do is to as quickly as possible, get in touch with your, with what your real actual valuation is. And then ask yourself, what do I need to do structurally to give this company a fighting chance, knowing that that's re…”

“Second, the only thing that typically goes down during downturns are valuations. Typically, users, usage, and dollars spent actually go up.”

“Every market valuation for any stock, public company, private company, even bond, is a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow. That's the basic mechanism of valuation. A number from today, like earnings per share, and a story about tomorrow, wh…”

“When you are valuing what is effectively still a seed stage company with no revenue and just an idea, what's it worth? How do you defend evaluation? You don't. And so this entire negotiation Was based on nothing. There's nothing to negotiate, nothing to give a…”

“It's going to create more appetite for VCs to do deals, but only at the margin will it increase valuations. Only at the margin. Only where there's like hysteria to invest, like certain AI deals. But other than that, unless there's massive competition, valuatio…”

“But the interesting aspect actually is, when looking at this chart, as valuations actually have just gotten back to the levels they were in, in 2020.”

“I think there's this overhang of valuations and we haven't yet seen the drop that is going to come and it's going to be so severe.”

“And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with Valuations. Valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics. Those were not metrics that were important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily acti…”

“Valuation is the number one reason you don't sell. Or get buyer traction on acquire just because the gap between, you know, the seller's expectations and the buyer, it's just too far off to close.”

“And when you go to sell this, if it is not subscription revenue and the numbers go up and down each month, it is a discount to your valuation.”

“And for them to keep going, you needed to keep doubling and tripling your media rights every seven, 10 years. So I just thought it was the right time, and it's bittersweet.”

“One of the really key things we've learned is that the decision to pursue work on a particular company is usually done with an idea of what you think the valuation is before you've done the valuation.”

“Interest rates are to valuations, you know, what gravity is to the apple.”

“There's no doubt we are deglobalizing. The obvious impact is higher inflation. It's higher inflation, it's lower margins, higher structural interest rates, which makes for lower valuations.”

“A lot of startups over the past year just raised at too high of a valuation. They're never going to be able to grow into it.”

“And by the way, the valuations get more realistic too. And I think that's a good thing for entrepreneurs in the long run, although they don't view it as such in real time.”

“The price in value, the price in valuation just doesn't matter in traditional ventures, even series A.”

“All these late stage companies are mispriced. It doesn't matter whether you're the bottom decile or the top decile, you are massively mispriced and there needs to be some correction between 30 and 70% on valuation.”

“Spent a lot of time, quite frankly, so far valuations are really high. So I wanna, you know, it doesn't help me to buy something that's overvalued.”

“I think it's going to take two, three, four quarters. For those companies that raised in early or mid 20, 21 to need to come back and there will come a time where they need capital and the pendulum will swing from, you know, purely power on the part of founder…”

“Our biggest misses have been on this question of valuation. Love the team, love the business, love the opportunity, have a great relationship, feel like this is going to work, and then we just sort of balk at the price.”

“And so I think over the next 12 months or 20, 22, I think we're going to see some really bubbly valuations that we've had start to contract down again.”

“Now, what's interesting is in the earlier stages, the mean has gone up, but the median has not gone up all that much.”

“So essentially what you are doing is you are leveraging the dollars that you bring in as a founder to unlock Even more capital to bring you nearer term value such that when you need to go out to market again, you incorporate that value into your valuation, for…”

“Companies who are growing at over 60% as they hit a hundred million in ARR are valued five times more than companies that are growing just a little less than that. Say at 20 to 60% as they hit a hundred million ARR.”

“You have to combine these two things to understand a business and to do evaluation properly. So in other words, the litmus test of a strategy is that it creates value. And you really can't understand or value a business until you understand the competitive sit…”

“We raised it an eight million dollar pre.”