Founders

Q: How do you define your company's valuation when you don't have any product or traction?

A recovering founder. Currently building something new. 2x exits @$500M+ (mostly got lucky)

Assuming there's no meaningful traction, the biggest factors would be the market condition (bull vs bear startup funding market) and the team composition

In the same SAFE round, a 3-person team that's former Google and Meta engineers developing a new video creation LLM model could get $20mm premoney value. A solopreneur working on a consumer social app could get $2mm premoney value.

So pay close attention to the market and the comps. Keep in mind this works maybe only for the first check; from there, it's all about traction and metrics.

For a pre-product, pre-traction team, valuation is almost completely arbitrary, i.e. a made up number - the biggest driver in this case would be "market rates" or "comps"

Michael Saylor talks about this a bit in a recent podcast. 

He weighed a “slow death” competing with MSFT or changing course into where MicroStrategy is now. I found it interesting hearing how he completely pivoted even as a public company.