Every other day, some startup is raising some ludicrous amount of money at some outlandish valuation. It feels like the mother of all pissing contests and tech journalists seem all too willing to play along.
Is it really going to make or break your career if you're the first to Uber's Series H round, the one between the $60 billion valuation and the $90 billion valuation.
I'll bet they're all chomping at the bit to be the first to announce the $100 billion valuation, because, you know, PSYCHOLOGICALLY SATISFYING ROUND NUMBERS!
Could you imagine what public market news would look like if every trade was covered like this?
On Wednesday of last week, Apple gained $15 billion of market cap. For those of you keeping score, that's a whole Snapchat... in a day.
Sort of positions the venture valuation pissing contest directly into the wind, doesn't it?
You know what I find a lot more interesting? When someone writes about a company for the first time.
I'd rather hear about a new company, have it's merits and pitfalls thoughtfully debated and it's potential impact pondered than discuss, yet again, how much some company might be worth based on a small amount of preferred private stock trading hands.
What would startup journalism look like if you couldn't write about new fundings?
What if everything you read was about things being built? Or stories of entrepreneurs and how they built awesome stuff?
Oh, and there would be no VC profiles unless something they backed got bought or went public. Then you could write the story about how they won the deal or picked it when no else else did.
It's June today. Why don't we just try it out for a month?
