
Silicon Valley Shaken as 19 Startups See Their Valuations Slashed - prostoalex
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/silicon-valley-shaken-as-19-start-ups-see-their-valuations-slashed
======
officialchicken
But how are the dragons doing in contrast? I never see any news about them
anymore. I presume they're just fine, and boring success isn't newsworthy. I'd
love to see how wide the gap exists between the dragons and the unicorns now
vs 2013/14, and what we can learn from that rather than obsessing over the
'corns.

~~~
cylinder
Dragons?

------
3327
The markdown / write off party begins.

Here is advice from someone who mentors and invests in many startups and
echoed also by PG:

All the $ in the world will not be able to buy back the chance/time concerning
whats possible in your early 20's such as backpacking around the EU or hiking
in India.

My two cents.

~~~
aaroninsf
Or late 20s.

The best thing I ever did was turn down a management path cherry job to take a
leave absence and, uh, backpack around the EU then hike in India.

I was supposed to be gone 3 months.

I came back after 10 to a new life.

Best thing I ever did!

* except also somehow convince my wife to wait it out for me those same 10 months. We now have two girls in SF public school.

~~~
trav4225
...or 30s or 40s or...

------
withdavidli
> Only 12 new start-ups reached unicorn status in the last three months of
> 2015.

You mean less people are doing whatever they can to get valuations at exactly
$1 billion? fortune.com/unicorns/

------
javery
"First Round's Fred Wilson" \- how do you get this wrong?

------
chollida1
I don't think this is worthy of being a story anymore.

Remember that as public companies, GOOG, MSFT, FB, etc are all marked up and
down many, many, many times a day.

Private companies can't be marked by a market so they get evaluated much less
often, usually once a month to once a quarter depending on what type of firm
owns them.

As someone who has gone through how to evaluate holding equity in a private
company, I can say its really an exercise in two things:

1) what will your auditor allow, this usually has lots of wiggle room and they
are just looking to see if you can justify your valuation.

2) What you can sell if for. This usually is the more stringent requirement.

Most of the time it really doesn't matter as you don't/can't liquidate your
holding in 30 days. But it can become an issue if you have a large redemption.

See a Matt Levine writeup on this where CPP sued a famous hedge fund for
writing down some non liquid debt during the period where CPP wanted to redeem
and then marking it back up in the months after they redeemed.

[http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-28/bond-
prices...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-28/bond-prices-and-
banker-mistakes)

~~~
prostoalex
Is it wrong to assume that investors of Fidelity's size have access to
company's metrics, and whatever metrics they were tracking in their valuation
model are under-performing compared to expectations?

