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Raising a down round when you're private is fundamentally different than the "market being down" when you're public ($AMZN is down due to macro factors). It mea
by dvt 4y ago
Raising a down round when you're private is fundamentally different than the "market being down" when you're public ($AMZN is down due to macro factors). It means a few things: old investors are diluted which is very painful, employees are diluted which means you'll lose talent, you're most likely desperate for cash which shows cashflow/war chest problems, and finally, the IPO strike price will most likely be even lower than expected.
- jstummbillig 4y agoI don't understand. Why would a publicly and a privately traded company react fundamentally different to the economy? What macro factors are you referring to, that fundamentally influence one but not the other?
- dvt 4y ago> Why would a publicly and a privately traded company react fundamentally different to the economy? For one, selling shares in a private company is much harder (if not impossible, barring buybacks), so that's why valuations are relatively stable (and ideally only go up, until an IPO). So by definition, private equity is less volatile than the public markets. Secondly, private investments are a fairly well-studied hedge against inflation (due to return horizons being relatively low and return multipliers being relatively high) and also do well during, and immediately after, a recessionary period (where public markets generally do poorly). (But maybe I misspoke, they are both, of course, affected by macro factors, but the effects are probably much more attenuated in private markets.)
- MichaelZuo 4y agoTo add: Everyone gets extra nervous after a down-round, or so I've heard. So even trivial things become magnified and causes suspicion, tension, etc...