Thinking of trying to get in Airbnb SDE before its IPO. Blind and Levels.fyi suggest RSUs for my target level (L4) are 3000-3500, which would worth 360K to 420k with current valuation (35B). What is the real valuation of this company by the time of its IPO (possibly Q2/Q3 2020) considering they haven’t raised any new money in 2 years? What is the internal concensus on how the stock will rise or fall in the next four years? How heavy should I discount its valuation if I ever get comparable offers from other companies? Current TC @ Zillow seattle: P3 192K
IPO market has soured. They’ll take a haircut if they really wanna go public. The cat is out of the bag on the public market being used as bagholders. It turns out, nobody wants to be a bagholder.
Discount 30%
I’d say at least 35% and It’s hard to be a unicorn these days. I don’t think investors are as charmed with SV as they used to be. Also it’s still really unclear to me why Airbnb is valued so much higher than pre-acquisition HomeAway.
Yup, that range sounds reasonable. After the other big IPO flops, definitely more caution
Is it too late to join AirBnB now? Your stocks won’t vest by IPO and could go south
Do you really think that a website that rents hotel rooms is worth 35B? I would discount it by 50-80% or more.
Their value is based on their ability to sustain growth
Right, and the second the economy starts to slow and shrink people will travel less, and it will hurt Airbnb hard.
Probably a 50% cut after IPO, given the current market sentiment on unicorns. However Airbnb is already profitable so that might make a bit difference.
Less than Expedia . It’s a boring website
Platforms can be worth a lot, but Airbnb isn't a platform that can "lock in" users like Facebook. It's really easy to compete with them, especially if you undercut on fees. Just look at Uber and Lyft... and how their competitors Bolt and Yandex.taxi (and whatever the ones in China are called) can knock them off easy.
Repeat after me: Startup valuations are a big fat lie. Startup valuations are a big fat lie. Startup valuations are a big fat lie. When people give a "valuation" for a not-traded company, they are dividing the price-per-share of the shares the last round got, by the fraction of the company those shares represented. But not all shares are equal, so that division makes no sense. Unless you're getting the same Series F Preferred Double Secret Bonus Shares that the last round of investors got (spoiler alert: you ain't), that "valuation" is completely and utterly bogus. You can assume Airbnb is "worth" at least ~5B... because that's how much some shares of it have already sold for. But that 5B already belongs to other people! I'd value your RSUs at no more than the paper they're written on. Okay, maybe $10-20 a share. Certainly not $100+. And don't forget to divide by the 4 year vesting schedule: after IPO, refreshers are likely to drop quite a bit, since then the company is actually paying something for them.
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