At heart it's simple enough, as I learned in sixth form accounting: you need something in your ledger to account for the difference between the asset value of y

At heart it's simple enough, as I learned in sixth form accounting: you need something in your ledger to account for the difference between the asset value of your business and the price someone will pay to buy it from you. Obviously the futher you get away from "my business is a factory that I own, my cash reserves, and a pile of materials that I can turn into product" and more into "my business is the smarts of a bunch of people who can leave with two weeks notice, a bunch of contracts that can be severed with 90 days notice, and an API that people love so much they don't want to go elsewhere" it gets very difficult to justify.