With Bending Spoons buying Miro, it is time once again to discuss the difference between private valuations and exit valuations. Miro has $600/m in ARR, and bought for $1.36/b enterprise value (they had a lot of cash on hand, so total is ~$1.79/b). If you are a venture backed company, you have 5 endings: public markets, strategic acquisition, revenue acquisition, long term zombie, or closing shop. (Sometimes there is a kind of reverse revenue acquisition, where the business is profitable and the founders buy it back - but lets keep it simple, ok?) The IPO window for technology startups has been wonky for basically the entire lifetime of Miro, compared to the previous decade. Private markets have tons of cash, and they're willing to pay high prices for equity, making it an obvious choice. Public markets also need a tighter line of sight to profitability, and are subject to the same kind of "strategic" thinking - only it has to be the zeitgeist that believes it. Miro's strategic window, like a ton of companies, slammed shut when AI took over the narrative. No amount of twisting to make yourself be "AI Native" was going to put you back in the spotlight. So nobody looks at the asset and goes "I have to own this or it's a strategic risk to the company". (This also hurts the IPO window, so you stay private longer, etc.) Revenue acquisition, however, is super on the table. They have a ton of customers, generating positive growth on a huge pile of revenue. Bending Spoons paid 2x revenue (we don't know the EV/EBITDA of Miro - but lets assume it's a much higher multiple than EV/Sales, because all that revenue isn't profit). Miro could have continued on the same course and speed - they're growing, they could certainly turn a profit, and they have a lot of revenue. But what they lack, of course, is liquidity. If they stay the course, they turn into a zombie - basically a company that can live forever, but can never generate a return. When you're a venture backed startup, this is bad for everyone - it's bad for the founders, its bad for the (early) employees, its bad for your investors, and its bad for the LPs who invested in your investors. The story you have to tell to stay independent is the story of how you recover into one of the top two buckets. So for Miro, this would be a story of becoming an AI leader - which, maybe? But how much would they have to prove to get paid like one, and how long would that take, and how much risk is in that story? Meanwhile, Miro is 15 years old. That is long enough to get married, have kids, want to buy a house, send your kids to college. If you hold early Miro equity that could be liquid - the risk gets carried mostly by you, not by anyone else on the cap table. At $600/m in ARR, Miro wasn't ever going to zero. So no need to talk about that one. :) So - if you're one of the folks looking at this and going "ha ha, venture valuations are so stupid" - I would like you to do the same analysis. Those high valuations meant cheap money to spend on growth. Those options are underwater, that's true. But lets work it out napkin math style: $1.3B of cash in. They raised $476/m in venture. Lets assume they had a 1x preference. That's $824/m left to split among the common (and venture). How many people at Miro have options at a valuation that clears? Lets assume a lot of the old guard. There's plenty of money here to have this be a good to great outcome for a lot of peoples lives. Miro is a success story. This was a good outcome. When you play the high stakes game, sometimes the tables turn. But they landed it nicely.