John Somorjai of Salesforce on the exit math behind today's startup valuations, and a16z's Alex Imme...
a16z(@a16z) · 商业与创投
John Somorjai of Salesforce on the exit math behind today's startup valuations, and a16z's Alex Immerman on the much bigger outcomes that now drive returns: John: "I think there's a lot of irresponsibility going on. The valuations are of course way too high." "When you think about investing, you want to think about, what are my exit opportunities? And not every company is going to go public. In fact, very, very few companies go public, probably 1% or less." "Once you get above $10 billion, for example, the buyer universe is so small, and yet you're seeing so many of these enormous multi-billion dollar valued companies out there, and there will be a reckoning that happens." "A lot of these companies have valuations that are not sustainable, that they won't be able to grow into, and are also, I think, going to be bad for their employees." Alex: "Part of my optimism comes from what a top one percent outcome was 10 years ago is very different from what a top one percent outcome is today... There have been these larger outcomes that drive the returns for the ecosystem at large." John: "I'm an optimist. I could not do my job if I wasn't an optimist. But just know that I see the thousands of companies every year that don't make it. Because they all come to us to try to be acquired." @jsomorjai @aleximm Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter a16z @a16z Salesforce's John Somorjai has spent more than 20 years doing deals for Marc Benioff, from Slack to six rounds of Anthropic, and runs a venture arm that has backed more than 750 companies. His playbook is finding great technology that's starved for distribution and plugging it into 15,000 sales reps. Salesforce piloted Fin on its own help site, where it went live in 14 days and now handles over 40% of the traffic, resolving 65% without a human. John joins a16z's Alex Immerman to discuss why Slack revenue is up almost 3x since the acquisition, how strong revenue can hide the churn that kills deals, the