In this episode of the Equidam podcast, Dan Gray and Daniel Faloppa delve into the intricacies of startup valuation, discussing its unique challenges compared to traditional business valuation. They explore the importance of coherent storytelling in fundraising, the role of employee stock options, and the impact of market trends on valuations. The conversation also touches on the significance of milestones in presentations and the influence of hype on investor perceptions. Overall, the episode provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of startup valuation and the factors that contribute to a successful fundraising strategy.
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Takeaways
Valuation is often overlooked in traditional businesses but is crucial for startups.
Startup valuation involves unique challenges due to their innovative nature.
Employee stock options can enhance retention and align incentives.
Pre-revenue companies rely heavily on qualitative assessments for valuation.
Coherent storytelling is essential in fundraising materials.
Milestones in presentations help clarify a startup’s progress and potential.
Market trends can significantly impact startup valuations, leading to bubbles.
Hype can skew perceptions of startup success and valuation.
The narrative around startups often omits the struggles faced before success.
Understanding the difference between value and price is key in valuation.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Startup Valuation
05:17 The Unique Challenges of Startup Valuation
10:30 Valuation Methods for Pre-Revenue Startups
18:27 Aligning Expectations Through Coherent Storytelling
23:47 Understanding Valuation Trends and Market Cycles
Transcript
Dan Gray (00:01)
Welcome to the Equidam podcast, which we started because nobody likes to talk about valuation as much as we do. I’m Dan Gray, the head of marketing. And I’m here with Daniel Faloppa, who is the CEO and founder. How’s it going, Daniel?
Daniel Faloppa (00:14)
Yeah,
great to be here. Really, really, really good intro. We do like to talk about it. Not a lot of people like to talk about it, but I think it’s very interesting. So yeah.
Dan Gray (00:18)
Nice.
It’s been talked about a little bit more recently, in the last six months. It’s become a bit more popular, but yeah, still. Being a valuation expert isn’t a showstopper at parties.
Daniel Faloppa (00:40)
Yeah. And I was actually just thinking about why. And I was thinking a lot of people never encounter valuation in more traditional companies. But then startup companies, it’s always the talk of the town, right? Like who got valued what and what kind of little MVP they have and how come they got a huge valuation.
And I mean, there are, you know, like TechCrunch and those type of publications are what, 50% fundraising news. And so, you know, but I was thinking really for a traditional company, you think about it way less and you think about revenue, you think about profit. You might think about raising some debt or you don’t even think about it as raising. You just think about getting some debt or something. And
Dan Gray (01:12)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (01:34)
And so you never think about the valuation until it’s time to exit, pretty much.
Dan Gray (01:38)
Yeah,
that’s very true. Before we get into that too much further, like I just want to get your perspective. I’m sure everybody listening like knows broadly what valuation is, but from your perspective, what is startup valuation? Why is it a specific discipline in terms of like process and outcomes? Perhaps.
Daniel Faloppa (02:00)
Yeah. Well, the valuation is just the price determination of anything. Normally, stuff doesn’t need the price determination because it’s set competitively. If you have half a liter of water, the Coke cannot cost 60 times as much. It can only cost something close by. Then for things that are a lot less…
commoditized, then you have valuators. You have a house valuator, you have an art valuator, and a business valuator as well. So that’s why. And then you get into startups that need valuation so much more frequently, but then at the same time, they have unique challenges, they have unique business models, they have unique future expectations. And that’s where…
like sort of normal valuation, normal business valuation that is used to, let’s say, quote unquote, even more commoditized businesses because more traditional businesses like a hairdresser show, a hair salon, a restaurant, that’s 80% of the bread and butter of traditional
They’re much more replicable compared to startups that are inventing an industry, inventing a business model, and have a completely different risk pattern. So that’s where the unique challenges in the process are. And also a lot more goes into the fundraising process. That’s also a massive difference in startup valuation per se, because, again, traditional businesses don’t do…
Fundraising, right? Or at least they don’t do it once a year, once every year and a half, like the average startup. So the concept of, for a valuator, the concept of making a valuation for the purpose of fundraising, like it really isn’t there that much. It needs to have a different layer of communicability on top of just being an academic exercise
for traditional evaluator doesn’t matter. The exercise is used once at the company sale. Those people are not going to need to be partners. They are just like the new owner is just going to run the business from there onwards. And so the communication of valuation is a different ballpark. And then they don’t have employees with equity incentives as well. So startups now more and more have…
equity incentives for employees that are related to the valuation of the company. Sometimes large expectations are set on the valuation of companies and that’s how they attract maybe top talent or so. And we get into another aspect of valuation that is not necessary for a traditional business, let’s say. So yeah, so start a valuation is its own beast, let’s say.
Dan Gray (05:17)
That’s interesting. And I like that you went back to talking about employee stock options, which you mentioned at the beginning, too. Because you also said, you know, people don’t really think about valuation, they don’t really talk about it outside of the startup world. But if you know, as these startups with employees, the options age and mature, and as it becomes more standard across industries and geographies elsewhere, like is
Are stock options going to become more common outside of what we think of as like the tech startup ecosystem and will it make people generally think more about valuation?
Daniel Faloppa (05:57)
I hope so. That’s a good question. So the real advantage that we’ve seen with stock options is around retention and alignment of incentives, right? So I think as everybody gets more refined in their thinking, we will see more and more of that. I mean, already, right, in Silicon Valley, there’s that famous…
person that painted the Facebook garage that got paid in options and got to be a millionaire. It’s about refinement of understanding, I think, on the general public side, because then in the end is the general public that by and large works in companies. If that understanding of stock options expands, companies are going to make use of that for sure. Right now…
The question is, I think the difference, if you work in a large company, pretty much anywhere, you have part of your compensation in options, but it’s just a tiny fraction, almost. It looks like a consultant sold the board on a plan for $100 a year. That’s not going to change the retention or the future of anybody. But…
For me, the impact of stock options is in the… And I don’t know if we want to get into that, but in the second generation of startups, right? The first time a startup is successful in a certain place and it has given stock options, then you have a significant portion of the population that can portion. Like that’s a significant number of people that can stop pursuing that wheel.
that rat race, they can stop and they can use their expertise to help younger startups and they don’t need to be compensated as much. And that expertise all funnels back into new startups, either as investments or as expertise. And it’s really where the flywheel starts, in my opinion.
Dan Gray (08:08)
Yeah, for sure. I’ve heard that talked about a lot, particularly in regard to some emerging markets, Latin America, perhaps, especially. The lack of that very early stage funding and expertise where you have a strong culture of employee stock options, when there’s a big exit, you create maybe 100 people who can then do angel investing and advise startups and help build up the ecosystem, which
I think is perhaps one of the biggest challenges that they have at the moment.
Daniel Faloppa (08:43)
Yeah, but it’s the same in Europe. It’s still the same in Europe. We are seeing, it depends a lot on the legislation, but in some countries there is an increase in adoption, but it’s still like stock appreciation rights, it’s still sort of additional compensation done in the way of the large public company, for example, in the Netherlands compared to, you know.
Dan Gray (08:47)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (09:12)
the ownership, really more distributed ownership model of Silicon Valley, I would say. So yeah, I really hope it gets more distributed.
Dan Gray (09:20)
Mm-hmm.
Going back to what you were saying before about valuation for early stage companies and how it differs. I guess I’m thinking of it in terms of how we imagine a startup is valued a very early kind of pre-seed, even pre-revenue startup. And then you think about how a traditional business is valued. And at some point in the maturity of that startup, those two kind of converge. It becomes…
predictable, dependable. So then, you know, it’s more looking at the kind of financial models with more reliance on them. But at the pre-seed stage, or the pre-revenue stage, like you really only have kind of the qualitative stuff to look at. So like, what do you think, what’s the right way to think about valuation for a pre-revenue company? And what do…
the kind of qualitative methods provide to an investor.
Daniel Faloppa (10:30)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great, it’s a great controversial situation there. But the, so the thing, the way that we think about it is that it’s always a comparison, right? So what are you comparing when the company is later, later stage and it has reached more predictable futures, you can compare it with, you can compare that. Like that’s fairly predictable.
You use discounted cash flow, you use discounts on those cash flows that are comparable across these different companies, and you get to the valuation of the company. When it’s super early stage, you use other comparisons on the side of… compare the startup with other startups of the same stage. And they are a little bit more crude.
comparisons and in the sense that it’s very much closer to just an average of the other valuations. And that’s where you see these bubbles developing, right? Because if the average raises, and we all use the average for the calculations, then everything is going to raise as a consequence, and it’s a cycle. So what we saw with our combination, which really we didn’t intend for,
what we made, we have a combination of qualitative and financial methods on the platform. And just logically, we gave more weight to the qualitative methods for earlier stages startups. And then as revenue becomes more predictable and projections become more reliable, we increase the weight on the methods that depend on the financials, the DCFs.
at the beginning as a bundle of potential, which is really difficult to untangle. And we… Like, they are more or less all worth the same, a little bit more, a little bit less, depending on the milestones that they have, depending on also the region where they are and so on. And then they have a plan, right? So this bundle of potential has one direction, but that direction is very…
fuzzy at the beginning. And so you cannot really put a lot of weight on that specific plan. As the startup matures, they dig their trenches towards that specific plan, and it becomes more and more real. And then from just a bundle of potential worth more or less an average amount, it becomes, okay, what’s this unique plan? What’s this unique trench that they’ve dig? What’s the value of that? And that’s reflected in their financial plans. And then, when they really get to maturity,
They’ve dug themselves so deep, sometimes it’s difficult to get themselves out. But then that’s the only thing that you use because they almost cannot change course. Sometimes in a good way, they’ve dug their own road and nobody can copy them. But sometimes, if the market changes, then they don’t have a way to get out. And I think it’s a very interesting metaphor. It really reflects…
how things actually evolve in practice. Because at an early stage, you can always change, and it happens a lot of times, the plan completely changes. And so all your projections are going to change, all the assets that you’ve built are going to change in value because they’re going to be put to a different use. And then later on, instead, those things are more and more entrenched.
Dan Gray (14:15)
Well, maybe you can shed a little bit of light on something that puzzles me about early stage investing. There are a few occasions when I’ve had the chance to grill someone who does early stage investing about their process. Now, often talking methodology, they’ll mention like, oh, there’s no point looking at DCF models. They’re too uncertain. There’s no value in those at such an early stage. But then I might ask. But
Like, you know, you still ask the startups for financial projections. And to that they say, of course we do. Like, of course we’re looking at financial projections. So then the question is kind of like, why, if they’re not going to do any modeling or any real analysis of those projections, or if they’re even going to discount what that might provide, why still ask them or, you know, are they not being quite honest?
Daniel Faloppa (15:09)
No, I think, I think.
The usage of projections is different. So first of all, I think a lot of people don’t use DCF, not because it’s not informative, but it’s just impractical. And of course, at the early stage, with the limited usage that projections have, if you need to spend a week making your own DCF model and reflecting on assumptions and things like that, you’re not going to do it. So there is space, I think…
to bring the usage of DCF way down in terms of how close to company inception it becomes practical. So that’s just with technology. But on the other hand, projections at early stage, they might serve also other purposes. And that might be why investors still ask about them because even if they say they don’t use projections, they still make their own projections. They still think, okay…
this market in my mind is worth a billion, and this company could get to 1% because it’s going to get super competitive. And that’s a projection. That’s revenue projection. And then they use that to understand, either they calculate the firm evaluation on that, or they just use that to understand whether that’s big enough for them or not, which is basically evaluation threshold again. So they are using projections anyways.
The specific projections of the startup then can tell them about… Well, they tell a lot about how the founders are thinking about their company, if you know how to read them. But they tell about growth ambitions, margins ambitions, knowledge of their own ambition and knowledge of what’s possible. And also a little bit on whether…
the company has any probability of profit at scale. And it also depends a lot. If you’re talking about like, there are situations in which projections are very, very hard, but I think a lot of people draw the line a little bit too soon on that as well. So if you’re talking about, for example, deep tech, right? Something that is gonna become commercially viable in five or six years, and you still have no idea whether this is…
technologically viable, let aside commercially viable, then we’re talking about something very, very difficult to forecast. But right now, a lot of, for example, FinTech SaaS products, I mean, it’s getting fairly known, right? So the bar on difficulty is quite distant.
Dan Gray (18:01)
Interesting. Yeah, I appreciate you going through that. I guess, ultimately, it’s something we talk about a lot. It’s about kind of aligning expectations through having a coherent story, a story that goes through all your all your materials, all the way through to your financial projections. To build confidence to share the vision with the investor and make sure you’re on the same page.
Daniel Faloppa (18:19)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe we’re not sure enough about why we say that. But the reason… So just to recap, what we say is that you want to reduce as much as possible the perceived risk. When I go and talk about the startup, the startup has certain risks and the founder really knows about them.
But in a presentation of 10 slides, some of them are gonna get lost and then we’re gonna have investors or any viewer of that presentation thinking the risk is slightly mismatched to what it actually is in the mind of the founder, right? So if the material is not coherent, then we start asking questions about it that are not questions about the business, they’re questions about the material. And then…
we really increase this. So if we see a lot of decks that have no milestones, so you have this incredible plan, and then I’m left with… And then my main question at the end of the plan is not, is this viable? What’s the risk? What’s the probability that it’s going to succeed? Things like that. My question is, have they launched already? Or have they started gathering feedback from customers? Are customers happy? Things like that.
Dan Gray (19:45)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (19:55)
They are the wrong questions. And if you spend all the time explaining those questions, you don’t even get close to the actual risk, talking about the actual risk of the company. And you are wasting a lot of time. Yeah, so that’s why we always say coherence is the main thing on the material and fundraising material.
Dan Gray (20:22)
That last thing you just said about milestones reminded me. I was watching Hustle Fund were doing a kind of live pitch like Shark Tank type thing last night. And they had a founder pitching. He’s doing some kind of platform to help build audiences and help with audience retention for creative people, particularly in the music industry. And he gave his whole pitch. And you know, they were kind of impressed, interested.
But the first question they asked was like, you know, he didn’t give any numbers about customers. You know, what’s the number? And the guy said, well, you know, I didn’t really want to talk about that because, you know, it’s not a very big number. I was kind of ashamed of it. And I said, you know, go on tellers. And he said, it’s only 1200 artists that we have on the platform. And all three investors like, what are you talking about? That’s a, that’s a brilliant stuff. That’s fantastic. That’s traction. That’s outside of your, you know, clearly outside of your friends and, you know, your personal network.
Daniel Faloppa (21:15)
Yeah.
Dan Gray (21:21)
Like it’s great. So yeah, milestones clearly very important.
Daniel Faloppa (21:21)
Yeah.
Yeah, and leaving those things out opens the door to wildly different guesses. So you leave it out and maybe the audience was thinking like they were at zero, or they were at 10 or they were at 50. And yeah, so it’s huge. And the other thing about Milestones is that, I mean, it doesn’t happen as much anymore, right? But…
It happens in crypto a lot. Like these fundraisers sometimes are just scams. And there is still that fear underneath, I believe, in people. So if you have a presentation without milestones, I mean, you could make up milestones if you wanted to fraud people for sure, but if you have a presentation without milestones, then literally anybody could have done that presentation.
Dan Gray (22:01)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (22:24)
A presentation without milestones is just a deck, right? It’s just some bytes saved somewhere and some pixels. The milestones are what makes the company. So that’s why we always say to everybody, equity doesn’t take into account the past revenue, past costs of the company, but fill them in, fill in everything. Even if you paid out of your own pocket because you still don’t have the legal entity, consider those as cost of the company. First, because they are.
Second, because they show that it’s a real company that has done things. And you haven’t just made up some slides about something and you’re presenting them now. So the milestones really make the story real and tangible.
Dan Gray (23:17)
Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I think talking about believable valuations, this is not a very smooth transition. So bear with me. It’s well covered ground, but I think it’s worth going back to maybe like summarizing this whole story we’ve seen over the last three months with valuations, certainly at the at the kind of high end collapsing, you know, the planners and the stripes, etc. You know, looking back on that,
Was it a valuation problem? How could this have been fixed or avoided, do you think?
Daniel Faloppa (24:01)
That’s a good question. It kind of keeps on happening, right? Bubbles and not only in start of valuation, but everywhere. It’s a fascinating question.
I think the…
Usage, well, a bit biased answer, but the usage of tools helps. We like trying to be objective. It’s still super difficult to understand what’s the objective valuation of a startup. And to be fair, up until five or six years ago, probably everybody was undervalued. So maybe a little bit more, maybe six or seven years, but…
but on average, and it depends on the location a lot, but in Europe until probably five years ago, everybody was undervalued. And then we got, in my opinion, to something fair, and then we got to overvaluation for startups during the COVID period. And now hopefully we’re gonna go back to a resonated level, standard level fair value, let’s say for everybody. The…
Yeah, I think a lot of it comes out of the fact that…
most of these things are new, right? So there have been startups before. Venture capital is very new, right? We started 25 years ago, like maybe 50, if you really consider the pioneers and maybe 200 if you consider mining and financing of mines. And then tech startups and this whole internet sector is extremely new.
And the fact that small companies and new companies actually have the advantage over established players because they can develop faster, they can work with new technologies, they have new knowledge, that’s super new. That only happened, well, probably happened also in industries that I don’t know about, but it happened in the, what is it, iron industry? Where they went from massive coal furnaces to electric furnaces that could…
reach effective scale at a tenth or a hundredth of the cost. And that disrupted the whole industry. And right now we’re seeing for the first time on a global scale, the fact that, you know, Slack can disrupt Microsoft that has been entrenched in all huge companies since forever, right? That would never happen on shipbuilding, right? You don’t just come up and go like,
Dan Gray (26:51)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (26:54)
disrupt the shipbuilding industry with better ships because I don’t know anything about how ships are made. Right? That doesn’t happen. So all these things were new, plus obviously COVID, right? And this incredible shift towards digital that we thought would happen. And we got this plus an incredible amount of capital due to COVID relief funds.
And the fact that the prices of all other commodities were very high, so money had to be invested somewhere, brought this pinnacle of a cycle of startup prices. I do believe, you know…
there’s too much hype in these type of things. And that’s also what we try to adopt as our philosophy around valuation is like, is not as good as it seems when it seems good, and it’s not as bad as it seems when it seems bad. And that’s always held true. And also the other thing is this incredible correlation that the media…
want to sound like those people that call the media, but the vast majority of articles that gather attention are making it a calamity, right? That when public company prices go down or the economy goes down, then startup prices are also going to go down. But startup prices are incredibly uncorrelated with the economy. And startup, the creation of startups actually,
is so uncorrelated with the economy that generally, when there’s a crisis, that’s when the best companies are started. So it’s actually counter-cyclical. So the fact that public company prices go down and everybody starts writing blog posts about how startup prices are also going to go down, for me, is a lot of fake alarmism on it.
Dan Gray (28:59)
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of kind of wild assertions on both sides, both positive and negative. The recent case that I find quite interesting is Figma. You know, this return to a 50 ARR multiple and people reacting to that saying, you know, you know, VCs is flowing again. You know, we’re back to, you know, strong, strong multiples, big valuations where, you know, a cynical person might look at that and say,
They raised in 2020 when collaborative work from home tools were very hypey. They raised again in 2021 in what we think about as this valuation bubble. And then they were acquired by the perfect exit partner, a giant corporation not likely to be very price sensitive, and also probably agreed the terms of that deal at the beginning of the year, if not earlier, perhaps.
But people are very keen to latch onto that and say things have turned around and be incredibly optimistic and bullish about it again. Is that a part of the problem? People are naturally inclined to be optimists, to push things upwards always.
Daniel Faloppa (30:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, or extremists, you know, like always upwards, and if it’s downwards, then a lot more down than it’s supposed to be. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s hard to know without the details about Figma, but it looks pretty clear. A component of that valuation was for sure defensive, right?
Dan Gray (30:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (30:44)
Sometimes, you know, deals… Well, the thing is, right, for acquisitions, but for anything, on top of just a normal valuation, just a normal fair value of a company, you also have synergies, right? So for Figma, let’s say that their multiple was half. Let’s say it was 25. Are they going to have an additional 10 billion of synergies with Adobe? Likely, right? Just…
from the fact that Adobe is not going to eat up Adobe’s market share. That’s already maybe enough synergies for Adobe, right? So we never think about this because it gets the whole valuation equation even more complicated, but they’re definitely there. So there was a time that we valued a company of like three people with a patent.
and no revenue, and they sold for $100 million. And the whole thing was that this patent was so key to the… It was like the last missing piece of the puzzle for a massive medical device type of huge machinery. And so, yeah, $100 million was definitely enough for that because of the synergies, not because the inherent value…
Dan Gray (31:48)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel Faloppa (32:07)
of that company was 100 million.
Dan Gray (32:11)
the company and the team were kind of like just packaging around the patent.
Daniel Faloppa (32:15)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that’s fair enough, right? That’s the difference between value and price, quote-unquote. Or we can get philosophical on that. And that happens also for startups a lot, right? It’s just that nobody sort of has elaborated this theory. But I really think the huge… The huge…
Dan Gray (32:28)
Yeah.
Daniel Faloppa (32:44)
swings of startup valuation when there is hype or not around the fund rates is really because the startup can capture more of the synergies. So for public companies, generally in literature, you see that the seller gets all the synergies, which means that when there’s an acquisition announcement, the seller price goes up and the buyer price stays stable or goes down.
paying according to the market, they’re either paying the right price or they are paying a little bit more, sort of. For startups, there’s no, obviously, you cannot see these things. But you see that FOMO from investors, hype around the fundraisers, those fundraisers where everybody wants to be in, allows founders to play that competition, to play…
investors against each other and increase their price and probably capture more of the synergies on top of their fair value.
Dan Gray (33:54)
Interesting. Yeah, and we talk a lot about some kind of, you know, in valuation, we talk about risk and perceived risk. And I think, you know, when you’re talking about the kind of hype around particular sectors, there is like how to put this, like that there is often the case where like the scene, there maybe seems to be a lot more momentum in a particular sector.
Daniel Faloppa (33:55)
Yeah.
Dan Gray (34:23)
in regard to fundraising and valuation, then there actually is. Because, you know, we, we see a certain, you know, let’s say the top 5% of startups are the ones that get the headlines, the featured in tech crunch. We see those raises and those valuations. Uh, we don’t see the rest. Like, is there a kind of compounding effect on hype because of that?
Daniel Faloppa (34:46)
That could well be. I don’t think we have enough data for that yet. But from the little data that we analyzed, it really looked like at least my perception coming from reading the news, let’s say, against what the data was telling us was very different. I don’t remember the data right now, but the number.
of years a startup would go before actually raising their first round of funding is definitely not that six months average that you see on TechCrunch. The amount of people that they have when they raised the first round, the amount of just like age.
development that they have done in a smaller fashion. So the ones that are talked about are really just the super fast growers, the ones that were started relatively recently and everything went right more or less and then they managed to raise. But the average company like grinds a lot more to get to that stage and then maybe they do get there.
but not in that super fast trajectory. The, what did I wanna say? No, I forgot, yeah. I think that’s it.
Dan Gray (36:22)
It’s the problem of everybody wants to read about the 17 year old founder who raises a few million from A16Z to do something crazy. Nobody really cares to read about the four 40 year old former bankers who are raising 300k as a seed round for compliance tech or something. It’s just not interesting.
Daniel Faloppa (36:40)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is that a lot of the times, the story is also edited, the story of the startup itself. Like if you read a lot of the… Like whenever Slack was fundraising, and they were on the press and things, I mean, they never talked about the five years grinding on the previous game that they were trying to make, and then…
they pivoted on the communication tool. That kind of got edited out of the story, even though the people were more or less the same. It was a pivot of the same company. But if you edit the previous part out, then it looks like a much faster race and trajectory, which, of course, gets them more press. So there’s that to consider as well. Yeah.
Dan Gray (37:38)
Yeah, I’ve certainly seen that firsthand in fintech in Berlin, especially. They seem to have a habit of changing founders after about six months if things aren’t going great and then they’ll raise money and the new CEO is now the founder and has always been the founder. You know, there’s no mention of the previous ones. Exactly. Yeah. It’s quite strange.
Daniel Faloppa (37:56)
Yeah, and the company started from when he started. Yeah, yeah, or she, yeah.
And sometimes it’s also connected with a rebrand and a change in name. And then it gets really hard to find the actual story before, because of course, nobody remembers that Carta was called e-Shares, right? And that they had to move out from Silicon Valley and go raise capital in New York because nobody wanted to fund them in Silicon Valley. And of course, now they raised from A16Z. So in the end, they managed, right? But…
But yeah, if you forgot that they were called something else, you’re never gonna find them.
Dan Gray (38:41)
Yeah, indeed. It’s like that there’s a meme going around at the moment, looking at some serious Fortune 500 companies and what they originally did before we knew them. Like, I can’t remember who it was. So someone was making rice cookers and now they make like microprocessors or something. It’s very interesting.
Daniel Faloppa (38:55)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dan Gray (39:05)
Well, we have just about hit the 40 minute mark. I’m about tapped out for now. You’ve definitely cleared up a lot of things in my brain. And, you know, hopefully going forward, future episodes, we’re going to aim to bring on some other guests as well with the three of us or two of us, whatever it will be. And yeah, looking forward to that.
Daniel Faloppa (39:31)
Yeah, same. Thanks a lot.
Dan Gray (39:34)
Perfect.
Daniel Faloppa (39:37)
Thanks.