> pg: "Yes, investors with preferred stock usually get their money back first. Sometimes they get a multiple, but that's considered overreaching nowadays and the more promising startups never have to agree to that. I suppose that is implicitly a target valuation in a sense. But no one views it as a target, because it only matters if things go badly." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6896833
That's how I feel about it as an employee. If the startup doesn't do well my equity is worthless anyway, so I don't really care if it is a clean round or lots of tricks to get the valuation/share price up like that by promising investors more preference when it doesn't do well.
This is pretty short-sighted though. The definition of "doing well" is relative to the last round's valuation, regardless of business fundamentals.
So if your company is actually worth $100M, but you raise $150M at a $1B valuation with a 1x preference, you would get nothing if the company sells for $150M later that year. That would have been a 50% return on the actual true company valuation, had you actually raised at that.
This is an extreme example but hopefully you get what I'm saying.
Yes, that's my point. The company "didn't do well" by the standards of the previous round they raised. But had they raised a round that valued them more appropriately, they may have "done well".
> pg: "Yes, investors with preferred stock usually get their money back first. Sometimes they get a multiple, but that's considered overreaching nowadays and the more promising startups never have to agree to that. I suppose that is implicitly a target valuation in a sense. But no one views it as a target, because it only matters if things go badly." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6896833
Of course it only matters if things go badly..