A fact that will alarm many people but is nonetheless true: startup valuations are bets by professionals that the actual value of the company is significantly higher.
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Do you have a sense of the ratio of valuation to the investor's expectation of the actual value? It seems like it must converge to 1 as the rounds get later, but I dunno.
VC firms are expected to get 2-3x on average. So that is the implicit multiple in earlier rounds. In very late rounds, close to an IPO, the investors are not VCs and the implicit multiples (and the risk) are lower.
