Down Rounds

AirBnB, the tech unicorn that monetizes your spare room has been hit hard by the Coronavirus academic. As the company and the phenomenon grew, more and more “investors” levered up to buy more properties to rent out short term. Some becoming so-called “super-hosts”, running dozens or even hundreds of rental units. There even emerged a phenomenon, of “STR arbitrage“, which is Short Term Rental Arbitrage: taking out long term leases on properties you don’t own,…

  The tag line for this site is “True Fact: Funding rounds are not revenue”, except in India, where a new tax code law has deemed that funding rounds that take place “at above fair value” are indeed income. The new rule applies to startups that have undergone a down round. If the preceding round was not from a VC firm registered with the Indian securities regulator (in other words it was from an angel…

In a $40 million dollar funding round at a lower share price (a.k.a “a down round”) Glassdoor CEO went on record to say “We view this as a slight up round” (I guess you can add diluting shares to inflate market cap to the alchemical bag of tricks in this wonderful New Economy). Still, with shares down 6.3% in this round, they are still clobbering their publicly traded Unicorn peers such as LinkedIn and Yelp….

We’ll file this one under “down rounds” given that not long ago Yahoo spurned a $45 Billion offer from Microsoft, early bids for Yahoo are coming in the 2 or 3 billion range .Remember, Yahoo recently bought Tumblr for presumably $1 billion  (does that mean all that “value added” by the acquisition has made Tumblr the entire company?).