(Full disclosure - I lead the valuations team at eShares) The question of audit defensibility is ultimately the only question that matters in a valuation. Our

(Full disclosure - I lead the valuations team at eShares) The question of audit defensibility is ultimately the only question that matters in a valuation. Our goal (as is the goal of other providers) is singular - to deliver a valuation that will withstand Big Four audit and that utilizes the most applicable valuation methodologies for the situation. Here's how we at eShares specifically have approached that: 1) One of our first hires on the team joined from a Big Four firm as a former 409A auditor 2) We actually built our product to anticipate audit - we provide a full valuation report in addition to all of the financial models and valuation models (with formulas still intact) to make the inevitable audit a much smoother and transparent process. (We actually post our models and reports for the world to audit as well on our website: http://esharesinc.com/409a http://esharesinc.com/409a) We took the black box out of valuations and replaced it with fully transparent valuations models that backs up every output that shows up in your valuation report. In our opinion, this makes a much stronger case. As the largest provider of 409A valuations in the country at eShares, if we couldn't stand up to audit, we would have been out of business by now. We've worked with companies from pre-Seed stage to post Series E, pre-acquisition and pre-IPO. -- tl;dr 1) Our team includes former 409A Big Four auditors, we've been audited and have never failed, and we deliver an audit-friendly valuation package with intact models instead of just a report. 2) eShares does more valuations than any other firm in the country (~200 this month alone). At that volume, we simply must be correct every single time. 3) We've applied our engineering team and the power of software to financial valuations. The quality is the same if not better than any other provider, but our valuation and audit process is just much more efficient and less costly for you Just as stock brokers still exist after eTrade came along, 409A valuations firms will exist after eShares. But for those that do their valuation with us, we think it's a better (and certainly less costly) product and experience.