{"id":1230243,"date":"2022-10-20T20:16:49","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T20:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/10\/20\/forget-flat-small-cuts-are-the-new-up\/"},"modified":"2022-10-20T20:16:49","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T20:16:49","slug":"forget-flat-small-cuts-are-the-new-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/10\/20\/forget-flat-small-cuts-are-the-new-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget flat &#8211; small cuts are the new up \u2022"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\"><span class=\"featured__span-first-words\">When venture markets<\/span> flip from greed to fear, there\u2019s a meme that goes around in startup circles that <em>flat<\/em> is the new <em>up<\/em>. It\u2019s shorthand for the idea that in more difficult market conditions, a startup defending its prior valuation in a proximate venture round is as good as raising new capital at a higher valuation in better investing conditions.<\/p>\n<p>The brutal repricing of tech companies in the last year has led to some notes \u2014\u00a0including from this publication \u2014 that we had once again found ourselves in <em>flat = up<\/em> territory. Today, however, the game looks a little bit different.<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em>The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em>Read it every morning on + or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p>News that Stripe is reportedly trying to execute a soft layoff by culling lower-performing staff landed today, along with news that Databricks, one of the other most valuable startups of all time, trimmed its internal (409A) valuation by a modest amount, around 7%.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, you might look at the news and think, dang, some of those unicorns did get out of pocket last year! After all, fintech giant Stripe took a 28% haircut to its own internal valuation earlier this year, so surely we\u2019re seeing signs of excess being drained out of the market?<\/p>\n<p>Actually no, not really.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When venture markets flip from greed to fear, there\u2019s a meme that goes around in startup circles that flat is the new up. It\u2019s shorthand for the idea that in more difficult market conditions, a startup defending its prior valuation in a proximate venture round is as good as raising new capital at a higher [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1174416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1230243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1230243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1230243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1230243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1230243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}