📈 Private venture marks are stale by design — nobody is paid to fix them

“Normally, what would happen in terms of figuring out the price is you'd want to use some validated secondary price, but obviously, it would have to be a market clearing price where new money wants to come in at that price. This is a little bit different because it's their pre-existing fund that's buying at that price.”

“But I don't like it. I don't like these kinds of things where one fund is basically scratching the back of another fund. It always tends to be the case that this stuff on the surface looks a little smelly and can be a little unseemly.”

“I think a lot of these startups now, if their shares were to be freely traded, would be trading below ... the last round's mark, so they don't want it.”

“ask a private equity investor what they would buy your position for. That's why I spend a lot of time talking to them because I want to know what this stuff is really worth.”

“when they have definite buyer interests at a certain price, that tells you that the market now has found or is in the process of finding the market clearing price”

“I've been approached by a number of people who are doing, buying strips of GP interest and strips of LP interest in venture funds”

“the market clearing trade may be 25 to 30 billion now. Now 25 to 30 billion for Stripe, you're incinerating $70 billion of equity value”

“we had a segment a couple of weeks ago where we were talking about these high-priced, late-stage unicorn rounds needing to get revalued. The IPO of Instacart was a good example of this where, yes, the IPO did about $10 billion, but the last private round was at $39 billion. So there is a big wave of revaluations or down rounds coming.”

“If you look at the Ford price to sales multiple, 78X for an $11.7 billion valuation at $150 million ARR ... Mondays at 12X plus, Asana 66X, and Smartsheet's at just around 8X”

“they're kind of the ceiling, you know? So I think founders still have maybe unrealistic expectations from the days when SaaS businesses were being valued at 100 times ARR”

“I think you're right. I think that we have a almost perfect comp there.”

“if you look at Adyen, what does it mean about Stripe? And I think the answer is that Stripe at that $50 billion round, $55 billion round is worth 25 billion. So there's a 50% markdown right there.”

“Think about what that means. If a lot of those unicorns are fake, what does that say about innovation in the American economy?”

“Both of the LP and the GP are in a dance there. Hey, we know that Stripe is not worth $100 billion right now. It's worth $50 billion.”

“The other thing is many LPs are actually bonus on the paper mark. And this is something that a lot of people don't realize. And so they don't have an incentive to dial around to the GPs and say, get your marks right, because it's actually going to reflect poorly on them if they were to roll those up.”