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Equidam @equidam

Startup Valuation | The best startups are valued, not priced.

Joined August 2012
  • Tweets 7,556
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  • Followers 6,529
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Equidam
@equidam
10 Apr 2025
The companies which had the greatest impact on the world (e.g. SpaceX, AirBnB, Coinbase) often faced the steepest challenges when fundraising. Valuation, done properly, helps investors understand the potential of novel ideas. It drives returns, and it accelerates progress.
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 12
The startup economy is splitting in two. AI now takes ~half of all venture dollars (up from a third). Fewer, bigger bets. Yet company creation is at record highs: 5.6M new US businesses in 2025. The link? AI.
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 11
1/ What auditors actually care about when they look at a private valuation — a short framework. --- 2/ Methodology. Is the approach recognised and appropriate for the stage? IPEV-aligned beats bespoke spreadsheets every time. ---
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 11
3/ Reasonableness. Are the inputs grounded in something external — multiples, comps, country data — or invented at the desk? --- 4/ Consistency. Is the same method applied to every company in the portfolio, each quarter? Or does it drift per deal? ---
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 11
5/ Audit trail. Can you hand over a document that shows assumptions, sources, and outputs without a two-week scramble? --- 6/ Full piece on how Equidam lines up against those four:
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 10
You can now read any Equidam article with an AI assistant in one click. At the top of every article: Read with Claude, Read with ChatGPT, Copy for agent. One tap hands the whole piece to your assistant — no copy-pasting, no re-explaining. Then you ask it anything.
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 10
Valuation is dense. Now you can interrogate it.
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 10
A $1B valuation can be almost entirely fake. A $10B founder just said so out loud. Here's the trick, called "dual-pricing":
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 10
Then the founder tells that $1B to employees pricing their equity, to angels, to the press. Almost nobody paid it. Mercor's founder says he's seen 6 rounds like this in 6 months. Serval: ~$400M weeks before its $1B "round." Sequoia's reply: that's just the market now.
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Equidam
@equidam
Jun 10
The valuation you read is a marketing number, not a fact. Founders, investors, do your own math.
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"AI-ready" usually means "we added a chatbot." Better version: your output is structured so the AI your customer already uses can read it perfectly. No chatbot needed. Equidam's new .md export is that.
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ElevenLabs has to *convince* its own staff to take equity. Mati Staniszewski (CEO) on Sequoia's pod: "In Poland we almost have to *force* employees to take the equity. In the US everybody knows it's worth something."
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~15% of US employees own equity. In Europe: ~7%. The gap is real. 🔗
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If your business runs through SPVs, JVs or project finance, the usual early-stage valuation shortcuts quietly break. New on the blog: how to value a startup with subsidiaries and SPVs.
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Founders often hide what they've already done before fundraising. Daniel Faloppa's advice: show all of it. Office, supplier contacts, registration, prior spend. Every piece lowers the risk the investor is pricing.
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Out of 150 founders applying for pre-seed: 5 get funded. 1 reaches Series A. That's 0.66%. Not because investors are wrong — because the asset class only works if 1 in 10 returns 10x. Build the company that doesn't need VC. Then choose. Full funnel math:
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Equidam
@equidam
May 28
885 lines. 44KB. Every number labelled. Every method explained in plain English. Formulas, glossary, industry benchmarks in the appendix. That's what's inside Equidam's new Markdown export, the format AI assistants actually want to read.
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Equidam
@equidam
May 28
When software is cheap to build, the software moat goes away. What's left is what was there before SaaS: brand, data, hardware, research, patents. And distribution power. Daniel on the Bee Formless podcast, 2 min:
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Equidam
@equidam
May 26
How Equidam started: a blog in 2012, written because founders kept asking how to calculate a valuation and nobody had a good answer. Daniel tells the story on the Bee Formless podcast:
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Equidam
@equidam
May 26
The €600K gap: Between what angels can give you (<600K) and what VCs will write a cheque for (>600K), there's a band most European hardware founders fall into. Public funding programmes are *supposed* to fill it. Mostly, they don't. 🎧 Ep18 of The Equidam Podcast:
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