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Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

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Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#31

Call me old-school, but I still don't buy into these "revenue multiple" nonsense. Traditional valuation metrics like PER, EV/EBITDA, DCF etc. all tie back in one way or another to the cashflow-generating potential of a company. Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue. I wish investors would just stop pretending tech…

old school investing approaches would’ve lost you a lot of money in the 2020 market.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#32

Call me old-school, but I still don't buy into these "revenue multiple" nonsense. Traditional valuation metrics like PER, EV/EBITDA, DCF etc. all tie back in one way or another to the cashflow-generating potential of a company. Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue. I wish investors would just stop pretending tech…

old school investing approaches would’ve lost you a lot of money in the 2020 market.

Old school would have never dreamed that the Fed would pump the market to prop up securities.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#34

Call me old-school, but I still don't buy into these "revenue multiple" nonsense. Traditional valuation metrics like PER, EV/EBITDA, DCF etc. all tie back in one way or another to the cashflow-generating potential of a company. Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue. I wish investors would just stop pretending tech…

I've done a DCF of a tech SaaS S-1 to test at the advice of a friend who is a PM in tech at a hedge fund.

It still seems like magic, and even more so then, but it penciled. Sponsor got in with the last pre-IPO round (think like a Wellington/Fidelity who essentially buys their IPO allocation by entering slightly early) at $3.5B, IPO was $4.5B, and Friday night post dinner w/ redbull DCF spit out ~~$5.0B to $6.5B. After a few months it trended up to that Enterprise Value. The mind is simply not good at understanding compounding at 70% (or whatever) free cash flow conversion. Not having COGS or working capital or CAPEX is magical.

That being said it’s insanely hard to move from a “things might be worth 10x EBITDA” to “things might be worth 10x revenue”. It’s like using different parts of the brain (left vs right) or quantum physics versus more traditional physics: there’s some magical stuff that’s probably rules based with underlying structure underneath that just doesn’t make sense.

Just one anecdotal example.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#36
post #26

>$49/$79 per user billed annually. Seriously who pays for such a rudimentary product all that money. The pricing doesn't make any sense.

Lets say you have an engineering employee with a base salary of 150k. His total cost to the company when you factor supporting roles is perhaps 300k. Assume this person needs to generate 2x that in value for the company, so lets say 600k a year. So that's 0.01% of the job he needs to do. If the tool is even somewhat useful that seems like a very fair price.

I am not sure how an engineering employee with a base salary of 150k would eventually cost 300k and why a customer should pay for that engineer to make 2x his pay for the investors gluing a couple of 3rd party APIs and making a dashboard.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#37
post #35

Off-topic: Does Apple allow you to self host & use on your website their San Francisco font? It appears this site is using San Francisco. https://sacra.com/static/fonts/SF-Pro-Text-Regular.837e72701...

It appears not.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/127350

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#39

Can people still passive-aggressively cc my boss on emails to me when they want me to drop everything to work on their special issue?

You can get back at them by cc'ing their boss when you respond. ;)

FWIW, I'll often cc my own boss when reaching out to someone in a different team, as I figure he can help with any coordination required. Hopefully that doesn't come off as passive aggressive but I guess it really depends.

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