"A company that has profitability within reach and is on track to be worth $100 million with several more years of hard work. This is nothing to be ashamed of"
I wonder if there's some vague sense of how disconnected one has to be from normal conceptions of reality to consider building a $100MM company something to be ashamed of.
I've always interpreted this sort of valuation as more about "potential best-case acquisition price" than about real market cap. Instagram was "worth" a billion dollars, because Facebook said so; that doesn't mean it had a $1bn market cap. But when VCs talk about you having a "$100MM company", that's what they mostly mean: that there might be a Facebook or two around who would pay that.
I'm actually curious, since we've seen a few (not many, but a few) tech IPOs of these SV darlings in the last five years: how well does their publicly-traded market cap today align with the projected valuations VCs invested at?
I wonder if there's some vague sense of how disconnected one has to be from normal conceptions of reality to consider building a $100MM company something to be ashamed of.