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by rkk3 1677 days ago
> Something's screwy about that 409A, it puts the valuation of the company at $3.85M on $10M in invested capital

That is not the valuation of the company, not all shares outstanding are common, some are preferred which are going to have a substantially higher FMV for an early stage.

I don't know what a "normal" multiple/mark-up preferred would normally have at this stage, obviously it varies on terms. 55M shares outstanding this early would not be the sign of a "healthy" cap table unless they didn't start with the standard 10M outstanding.

1 comments

The preferred price is about $0.9 (I heard it's been like this for the last 2 rounds). Does that mean the current valuation of the company is $49M?

The parent comment is also correct. We've experienced a down round due to the pandemic.

If the company's gone through a down round, it's very likely they took funding on unfavorable terms (i.e. worse than 1x liquidation preference), which makes it that much less likely your (non-preferred) equity would ever be worth anything. Take the cash offer (though, if you're in the US and have 4 years of experience, $120k is a bit of a joke too; you should be able to do substantially better even limiting yourself to full-remote companies).
> If the company's gone through a down round, it's very likely they took funding on unfavorable terms (i.e. worse than 1x liquidation preference), which makes it that much less likely your (non-preferred) equity would ever be worth anything

which is expressed in the preferred share's being valued at 13x the common shares

> Does that mean the current valuation of the company is $49M?

No.