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rwmjtoday at 4:51 AM3 repliesview on HN

Cameo (an example in the article) is an interesting one. It seems like a stable, steady business, making money, should be easy to accurately value if you have access to the financials. No surprise that the "It's $1bn!!!" valuation came from Softbank Vision Fund. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameo_(website)


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golddust-geckotoday at 12:45 PM

This is I think a very common issue. The term "startup" has two connotations: a nascent business trying to find its product/market fit and "a private business whose capital structure is dominated by VC money"

Companies that fall out of the first definition -- they've found their market, such as it is, but it's smaller, more competitive etc., than is needed for hypergrowth -- but are still in the second definition are in a bind. They've generally used up all their ideas, and have created a nice, small business. This should be a win, but in SV it's the worst kind of failure. The VCs aren't going to want to book a loss, so the company thrashes about trying to figure what else to do while trying to keep its business running. They should and ought to be evaluated using normal accounting, but that would mean the value of the business is a fraction of its "valudation"

This ends in the company being strangled by its own mal-investment, or sheer exhaustion when everyone, the management and the VCs, face reality, take the L, and leave the business for private equity to run off the remaining terminal value. Maybe sometimes this becomes a lifestyle business, but more than likely it's just a transition from the washing machine of "this month's great idea for growth" (they never pan out) to the grind of cost-cutting and extracting any customer surplus out of the system, leaving everyone miserable.

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v5v3today at 9:37 AM

I'm assuming there is a lot of local competition to Cameo in other countries?

As it has a large potential market if it did dominate globally.

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TZubiritoday at 6:49 AM

It also peaked during the COVID lockdowns, lots of actors needed alternative sources of funds. Maybe the numbers for 1BN came from multiplying revenue into the future, or hell, expecting it to grow even.

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