那这个时候对投资人来说，A公司值多少钱呢（投资前估值）？投资100万美元之后，投资人获得公司的股权比例是多少呢（投资后股权比例）？比如，如果双方同意投资前估值为100万美元，那么投资后投资人的股权比例为50%（创始人出让公司的一半，丧失控制权）。或者，假如公司投资前估值为400万美元，创始人还能持有非常健康的80%的股份。

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Once you have a potential investor excited about your team, your product, and your company, the investor will inevitably ask “What is your company’s valuation?” Many entrepreneurs stumble at this point, losing the deal or most of their ownership, by having no answer, playing coy, or quoting an exorbitant number.

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“I’ve tried to explain this to VC firms. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. Would that mean sitting on too many boards? Don’t sit on their boards. Would that mean too much due diligence? Do less. If you’re investing at a tenth the valuation, you only have to be a tenth as sure.”

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Entrepreneurs spend a huge amount of time recruiting and selecting ideal candidates to join them as they build a company. Many sophisticated VCs hold true that people matter most in predicting a company’s likely success. Particularly in the early stages of a company’s growth, CEOs think a lot about who they want around the table with them. Shouldn’t they chose their investors the same way? The answer is, in my experience, they almost always do.

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Business-to-small & medium business (SMBs): For companies targeting SMB customers, investors want to believe that there is a validated, repeatable profitable marketing equation. The marketing equation is defined as the relationship between the customer lifetime value and the cost of acquisition. Put simply, investors want to know that a company can repeatedly acquire customers for $X and generate more than $X in gross profit from each customer. Depending on the business, investors will likely vary in how many customers they want to see profitably acquired.

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 I genuinely think that as a board we considered an objective view of when was the right time to sell the company. That is the duty of loyalty which board members have to the company’s shareholders. A board member should be explicit about his own incentives, but put them aside to attempt to objectively measure whether accepting an offer to sell the company is the right outcome for all shareholders.  But how does a board member figure out whether it is in the interests of the shareholders to sell?  Ambitious startups have so much potential, yet are typically backed with expectation of eventual liquidity.

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