The relevant metric is not exit price, it's ratio of exit price to pref stack; i.e. raise $40M and sell for $50M, founder is worse than if they raised $2M and sold for $10M.

Economic returns of VC-backed companies follow a power law distribution. This means that the vast majority of the returns for the VC are at the "fat head" of the distribution. The "long tail" does not impact returns, for the VC.

However, for the founder, those returns in the tail can be life-changing. It takes a $5B exit for YC to care. But a $5M exit can be real money for the founder.

So the correct math, from the perspective of the founder, is not "what % are unicorns" but rather "what % sell for more than capital invested" and that number is likely to be closer to 50% than 1%.

I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.)

Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?

UKG is privately held.

Checkout.com was most recently valued at $15 billion.

If you are not posting exponential growth, then you will likely give up more and more control with each subsequent round.

You can't include primary and secondary financings in the same total, because you would be double-counting. That would be like measuring a public stock on its total volume traded, not its market cap.

For example:

- Investor A invests £100M into Uber for 1M shares

- Investor B buys those 1M shares from Investor A for $400M

- Investor C buys those 1M shares from Investor B for $500M

There has been "$1B in fundraising" but: (a) only $100M went to Uber and; (b) the market cap of those shares is $500M

“There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!

Any pointers on the most polite but firm way to defer speaking with investors when you're not ready to raise?

We just raised Seed, and get 5-10 inbounds per week asking about Series A. I usually write something like:

"Thanks for the note. We recently closed our seed round and are not looking to raise at the moment. But we will definitely reach out when that changes."

Hopefully that's not too curt/dismissive? Thanks in advance for any tips.

Not $45k

It is difficult to trust the calculator when arithmetic errors exist in the prose.

As such, the x-axis is a metric about the population, not the individual. I happen to use them a fair bit as I find them easier to intuit density from than the alternative, which is to plot on a single line with transparency.

I took that to mean that the car exclusively refueled on Superchargers, so the fuel cost was $0. That is a legitimate apples-to-apples comparison to the ICE vehicles.

You are correct in the ratio (1:100) but I think you mistook departures for flights and extrapolated 2 orders of magnitude too far.