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New research indicates ‘Unicorns’ are overvalued

252 点作者 good_vibes将近 8 年前

24 条评论

cjlars将近 8 年前
The key issue is that a lot of startups use various contractual terms -- things like options on exit, liquidation preferences and others -- to take money into into the business at high nominal valuations, while still offering downside protection (optionality) to investors. The public at large usually just quotes the nominal valuation and goes from there. However, the optionality of those terms has substantial financial value, so the nominal valuation is often far from the truth.<p>These authors have developed a system to tease out the optionality using standard financial methods (using methods like Black-Scholes, for example), which can give us all a better understanding of the true worth of these companies. Far overdue in my opinion.
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gjem97将近 8 年前
&gt; The average unicorn, the researchers note, has eight stock classes for different types of investors, including founders, employees, venture capitalists, mutual funds, and others.<p>As an aside, this is why I think that any effort of a prospective employee to divine the value of a stock option package is likely in vain. Without a detailed accounting of the ins and outs of the preferred stock that is senior to your common shares, it is nigh impossible to tell how much the common shares (and options thereon) are worth.
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arjie将近 8 年前
I think when a model is presented like this, it should also show the examples where it fails. In the article, they show Square (Series E valuation at 6 B, pre-IPO 2.66 B) where the &quot;fair valuation&quot; correctly models closer to pre-IPO at 2.2 B.<p>However, let&#x27;s look at another example. Take Nutanix (Series E valuation at 2 B, pre-IPO at 2.1 B). This model values it at 0.8 B on their table, almost a third of the IPO price.<p>There is no explanation forthcoming in this article as to why that&#x27;s the case. This makes it seem like the Square example was cherry-picked.<p>I picked NTNX at random, so I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s the one exception. I&#x27;m not going to exhaustively check every result, however. I expect them to do that for me and not sell me a story without pointing out the terrible exceptions.
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sebleon将近 8 年前
The deal terms for unicorn investment rounds are less about company fundamentals, and more about the scarcity of great startups.<p>There&#x27;s more money than there are good deals in Silicon Valley, so later stage investors are forced to offer more money for less equity in order to beat other term sheets. This ends up looking like sky-high valuations, since investors that offer fair-market-valuations are unlikely to get picked. Founders naturally gravitate towards minimizing dilution.
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WestCoastJustin将近 8 年前
If you are looking for the table of companies, like I was, then download the report via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455</a> and skip to page 48.
neom将近 8 年前
I was fundraising last year for the company I work at and one of the investors asked me if I&#x27;d consider doing XYZ. I said, well that would put our share price to such that you would create a massive valuation on the business, so no. They seemed confused and said but wouldn&#x27;t you want to make the company that valuable. I smiled and ended the meeting. What they wanted would introduce an enormous amount of risk to the business because Valuation != valuable. I would imagine this type of conversation is how founders end up on that list. I think our business is great, but I&#x27;m not delusional.
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artellectual将近 8 年前
The key thing here isn&#x27;t about the fact that they are overvalued. It&#x27;s more important to discuss the repercussions and what anyone is doing about it. It&#x27;s not just Sillicon Valley, it&#x27;s the startup scene all over the world.<p>How much is something really worth. Well how much is the next person willing to pay, that&#x27;s really what this is all about. I&#x27;ve been down the road of VCs, exits etc... before and to be honest most of it is just fluff people make up, loop holes in the way things are valued, forget basic business and accounting they literally are making this up as they go.<p>Most VCs I feel have a detrimental effect on startups, the only thing a lot of them provide is money, which isn&#x27;t always what a startup needs. It doesn&#x27;t matter to the VCs that they are mostly wrong, they just have to be right once.<p>The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on. How valuable something is ultimately depends on how many lives it improves. Whether something is valuable or not is measured by the amount of pain inflicted on society if the startup didn&#x27;t exist, and ultimately if something is not needed, it wont survive anyway. The market is cruel like that, and having VC money shields entrepreneurs away from that crucial factor. All this fluffed up valuation has nothing to do with the survival of a business anyway.
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singaraja将近 8 年前
Square is valued at 8.69B in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;sq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;sq</a><p>So if this article is to be trusted it is overvalued by 4.4 B $. that is another square.
dmourati将近 8 年前
May I recommend anyone wishing to understand more about valuation read the book Venture Deals?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalist&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1119259754&#x2F;ref=dp_ob_title_bk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitali...</a><p>The subtitle is tongue in cheek but also gives you a sense of how much you can learn and how rare company you are in once you understand the details.
surrealize将近 8 年前
If you&#x27;ve been an employee at a unicorn and have common shares&#x2F;options, check out table 8 (page 48) that lists common share valuations according to their model.<p>AIUI, the common share FMV they list should be comparable to the 409A common share valuations you may have gotten. Roughly speaking, assuming the funding round in the table is close in time to the 409A valuation.
markm248将近 8 年前
New research indicates lottery tickets are overvalued.
NumberCruncher将近 8 年前
Evergreen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&#x2F;press-release-basecamp-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment-c221d8f86ad7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&#x2F;press-release-basecamp-valuation-...</a>
pascalxus将近 8 年前
The subject title seems about right, but I take issue with the use of the word &quot;new&quot;. they just found this out?<p>Nevertheless, it&#x27;s not that much: 50-100%. that&#x27;s hardly a dot-com bubble bust.
TrickyRick将近 8 年前
Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what is essentially a new IT bubble? After all, it bears all the traits of the last bubble so all that&#x27;s missing is a trigger.
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theprop将近 8 年前
More details on how they calculated everything would be nice. A better place went bankrupt!
hectorr将近 8 年前
Maybe all asset classes are undervalued relative to the currencies they are priced in.
tomblomfield将近 8 年前
TL;DR it is not fair to take the per-share valuation at the last round of funding and apply it to all stock if the newly issued stock has preferential rights.<p>10 apples are worth $100. 90 oranges are not therefore worth $900.
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skdotdan将近 8 年前
You don&#x27;t say?
fs111将近 8 年前
news at 11
maxehmookau将近 8 年前
Bears shit in woods. Pope catholic.
romanovcode将近 8 年前
Wow, in other news - sky is blue!
EGreg将近 8 年前
This is what Edgser Dijklmnopqstra was saying back before these unicorns existed.<p>We have drifted far from the vision of people building up computing.
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gcb0将近 8 年前
you know how Nigerian scammers write bad English on purpose so they don&#x27;t draw smart people by mistake and waste time dealing with them?<p>unicorn valuation is the same mechanism.<p>do it so obviously wrong that you only draw dumb people who think they are the only ones smart enough to see the valuation is off so they buy thinking they can profit from their clever and unique insight. and the scam is complete.
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charred_toast将近 8 年前
Yeah, when fucking websites are worth more than real estate it takes a genius to figure out there is something amiss. &#x2F;s
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