Dec 16 -- Revenue multiples, How You Know, Vanity Milestones, Running a software team at Google. #ParisIsBack - THE PARIS TECH GUIDE. Revenue Multiples And Growth. When you say “the stock is trading at 20x revenues” people rightly shake their head and say “that is nuts.” I got a lot of tweets like that in reaction to my comments about the Uber valuation in the LeWeb breakfast chat. However, what people fail to realize is these things happen in a moment in time and that stocks won’t trade at 20x revenues forever. Let’s take a fictional company that has $1bn in revenues in 2014 and goes public at $20bn, 20x revenues. Let’s say it will double revenues in 2015, then grow 60% in 2016, and 40% in 2017, and 30% in 2018. So here are the revenue numbers So, let’s now look at profits, since valuations are ultimately a function of profits, not revenues.
Let’s say this fictional company is breakeven in 2014, but expects to make 10% EBITDA margins in 2015, growing to 25% EBITDA margins by 2018. Let’s say this fictional company’s stock will go up 10% a year each year until 2018. So here are the Revenue and EBITDA multiples that fall out of this thought exercise. How You Know. December 2014 I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page.
Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them? A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this question, at least something that made me feel better about it. Hilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a problem and solve it. That has always seemed to me an important point, and I was even more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert. But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place? Reading and experience train your model of the world. Ten Good Reasons to Take Venture Capital Money. Following up on my post from Monday that rang like "reasons not to take VC money" here are some reasons you should: 1) You really like the investor and believe they can add more value than you give up in equity. 2) You are growing, and if you don't raise, you won't be able to build the infrastructure required not to come apart at the seams. 3) You have the team in place or identified to build the product, you've done your homework by talking to customers that it is, in fact, the right product, and you're the best person to lead the effort, but you can't fund the build of the product yourself. 4) You've identified the best team, and while they're asking for reasonable startup salaries, you can't afford to hire them quite yet. 5) You've figured out how to get a sales funnel going, the flywheel is turning, you've got positive ROI on incremental salespeople or customer acquisition dollars and now you want to put gas on the fire.
Vanity milestones | cdixon blog. Running a software team at Google. I'm often asked what my job is like at Google since I left academia. I guess going from tenured professor to software engineer sounds like a big step down. Job titles aside, I'm much happier and more productive in my new role than I was in the 8 years at Harvard, though there are actually a lot of similarities between being a professor and running a software team. I lead a team at Google's Seattle office which is responsible for a range of projects in the mobile web performance area (for more background on my team's work see my earlier blog post on the topic). One of our projects is the recently-announced data compression proxy support in Chrome Mobile. Academics will immediately recognize the parallels with being a professor. There are of course many differences with academic life. I do spend about 50% of my time writing code. I do exert a lot of influence over the direction that our team's software takes, in terms of overall design and architecture.