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By PASCAL FINETTE

The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.

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Jun 12th, 2016 Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

How Much Is Your Startup Worth (The $1M Question)

One of the most vexing problems for anyone raising equity-based funding (typically Series Seed and onward) is the question of valuation. I get this question all the time from the founders I work with: “We are going to raise money from investors; how shall we value our company?”

Your typical startup doesn’t have any hard numbers to go by — you are pre-revenue and pre-profit. Mature businesses are typically valued at a multiple of their revenue; with the multiple depending on your industry.

For startups that doesn’t work. Sometimes you can look at comparable funding rounds — company X looks a lot like you and raised $Y million on a $Z million valuation.

Truth be told — determining your valuation is insanely easy and requires quite literally only 4th grade math:

How big of a check do you want — divided by — the ownership percentage — equals — the value of company.

(Michael Dearing from Harrison Metal brought this to my attention.)

It’s truly as simple as that. If you’re raising $3M and you want to give up 30% of your total equity for that investment, your valuation is $7M pre / $10M post money (if you’re unclear about the distinction of pre and post money valuations, read this article).

Simple as that.

With all this being said — good luck with your fundraise!


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