Aileen Lee, Founder and Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures recently wrote an article entitled "Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later" (1/18/24) which was a follow up to an article she wrote in November, 2013 entitled "Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups".

Our SaaS Talk™ with the Metrics Brothers co-hosts, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike do a deep dive into how private and public company valuations are calculate, explore the difference between Market Capitalization and Enterprise Value, and uncover a few of the "inside baseball" secrets to how $1B Unicorn may be worth much less.

Topics discussed include:

• Market Capitalization
• Enterprise Value
• Participating vs Non-Participating Preferences
• 1x, 2x and 3x Liquidation Preference
• Common vs Preferred Stock in a Private Company
• Stock Option Re-pricing - beware the last post money Unicorn valuation
• Onceacorn, Decacorn, Supercorn, ZIRPicorns, Papercorn, Zombiecorn, Unicorpse

The number of unicorns has grown from 39 in 2013 to 532 in 2023 per Cowboy Ventures (1,000 according to Battery Ventures). Unfortunately ~ 40% are trading for a much lower price on secondary markets than the last post-money valuations.

If you love the idea of creating or being part of a VC backed company worth more than $1B, or are just interested in the material reduction in the creation of new unicorns, this episode is full of detail, insights and a little humor!

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