The economy can be broken for a long time. Between 2013-2016 I worked in a Mobile ad-tech startup, we spoke of valuations as 2x revenue and SaaS based analytic

The economy can be broken for a long time. Between 2013-2016 I worked in a Mobile ad-tech startup, we spoke of valuations as 2x revenue and SaaS based analytics at 5x revenue. We thought that there was a bubble at that time when firms started getting high valuation multiples without any cash flow/profit. Now 7 years later Uber trades at a 5.8x multiple to revenue, google at ~10x, and salesforce at ~10x. Companies like Hubspot trade at ~24x revenue, and Snowflake trades at ~100x revenue! Revenue multiples are a pretty awful metric, but the crazy thing in the above calculation is effectively inversely correlated with earnings while also being only loosely correlated with revenue growth. While this doesn't look sustainable, it's quite possible that it lasts for long enough that a contrarian bet won't pan out.