I don't short because I hate the company. I short because I believe the stock is overvalued relative to reality.
Conventional valuation methods were built for the industrial age. They do not apply to exponential-growth technology platforms.
If you can't build a simple model for why a stock is worth buying, you're gambling, not investing.
Going from $46 billion to $6.7 billion in one year teaches you things that no business school ever could.
Walmart paid $16 billion for a company that had never made a profit. They weren't buying our P&L. They were buying access to 1.4 billion consumers.
We went from 30 employees to a $13.3 billion valuation in under a year. The highs were unreal. The correction was also unreal. Both experiences teach you something important about building in crypto.
A LeBron James dunk sold for $208,000 as a digital clip. People called it insane. But a physical LeBron rookie card sold for $5.2 million and nobody blinked. Digital collectibles aren't crazier than physical ones — they're just newer.
Our valuation went from $10 billion to $2.7 billion. That's painful. But we're still the third-largest hotel chain in the world by room count. The company is real. The valuation was the part that wasn't.
If you want to know what a stock is worth, look at the sales. Earnings can be manufactured. Revenue is harder to fake.
The most dangerous thing you can do in venture is invest at a price that requires perfection to earn a return.
Price is the most important variable. A great asset at the wrong price is a bad investment. A troubled asset at the right price can be a great one.
Peter Thiel invested early. Tencent came later. A $9 billion valuation for a European neobank with no branches. The thesis is simple: banks are software now. The buildings are optional.
Flipkart incubated us. Walmart acquired Flipkart. Suddenly we were a subsidiary of a $400 billion American retailer. Then we separated and became a $12 billion independent company. That's a wild corporate journey.
Visa tried to buy us for $5.3 billion. The DOJ blocked it. At the time it felt like a disaster. Then we raised at $13.4 billion. Sometimes the government does you a favor.
We hit a $7 billion valuation. For a telehealth company that started selling ED pills. If you told investors that pitch in 2016, they would have walked out. But the numbers don't lie. And neither does the demand.
Our market cap went from $4 billion to $200 billion in three years. Then back to $25 billion. The rollercoaster didn't change the business. The business was always the same. The market just stopped paying for growth.
We bought Livongo for $18.5 billion. At the time, it was the biggest digital health deal in history. Then our stock dropped 90% and suddenly it looked like the most expensive acquisition in history too.
We hit a 5 billion dollar valuation before I turned 23. The number means nothing if we cannot turn it into a real business.
SoftBank valued us at 4.8 billion. The DEA valued us as a problem. Both were making a point.
A 1.9 billion dollar valuation for an AI company that builds its own LLMs. That is a bet on independence.
We are in a crypto supercycle. Traditional valuation frameworks do not apply to this asset class.
We became the most valuable startup in Latin American history. Then we learned that valuations aren't profits.
$13 billion valuation for process mining. Most people can't explain what it is at a dinner party.
A down-round is not a death sentence. It's a reality check. What you do after the reality check is what defines you.
A business is worth what a strategic buyer will pay, not what a financial model says.
I've always liked low P/E stocks. They have a limited downside.
If you buy stocks with high growth rates, you are buying hope. Hope is expensive.
When a company goes bankrupt, there is always a price where it becomes a good investment. Always.
The market will give you your price eventually. The question is whether you can wait long enough without flinching.
When a stock's dividend yield reaches its historic high, the stock is undervalued. When it reaches its historic low, the stock is overvalued. It is that simple.
The market is driven by fear and greed in the short term. Dividend yield cuts through both emotions with arithmetic.
Our models suggest the equity market remains undervalued relative to its earnings potential.
The dot-com boom taught me that markets can stay irrational far longer than you expect. And then correct far faster than you are prepared for.
There's no such thing as toxic assets, only toxic prices and toxic debt levels.
What private equity is doing today is buying small, expensive companies with a lot of debt.
Have the market tell you what they think is a fair valuation.
You cannot pay any price for any stock, no matter how good. No matter how great the company is.
All assets eventually follow the laws of gravity. The only thing that matters to investors at the end of the day, and this has been true for millennia, is cash flow.