糖心视频

When in March of 2018, it looked like a win. The firm hadn鈥檛 raised capital , an eternity in startup terms. But then later that year, the cloud database-spreadsheet-and-more startup stacked another $100 million into its account in the form of a .

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Capital was hungry to get into the company, pushing its venture rounds together and piling money onto the company鈥檚 desks.

Airtable isn鈥檛 alone in taking on lots of cash, quickly. famously because it could. And recently raised an just to more highly. Brex, of course, isn鈥檛 a SaaS company like our other examples, but it fits our financing narrative well.

In 2019, it seems that there鈥檚 very little upper bound for capital and resulting valuations bestowed upon the hottest of tech startups. This means that companies that venture capitalists all want to put money into aren鈥檛 valued on fundamentals (always a risky concept in the venture world), but instead on an expectation of outsized returns despite paying sky-high dollars for every user, paying customer, or current ARR base.

We can see this play out in the history of Airtable. Airtable鈥檚 valuation shot to between its Series B and its Series C. That鈥檚 a bonkers pace of value creation, at least on paper. What Airtable gets out of the deal is lots of capital at a low dilution cost; investors get a long-term wager on a company that they expect to exit for billions, if not tens of billions.

Your metrics have to be pretty amazing to engender that amount of confidence in private investors. Or you鈥檙e good at scaring them into thinking that they are about to miss out on the future and a lifetime of bragging rights.

But perhaps most notable of all is the . The firm raised a tiny $10 million against an $800 million . A sum of money so small compared to its valuation that the firm effectively suffered from zero dilution. (Notion could have secured a higher valuation, but as to avoid hype; the move failed.)

So what exactly is all that appealing about ? For one, work trends are changing.

Notion, with its merging of to-dos, calendars, notes, and team collaboration, reduces the need to switch between multiple apps throughout the day. For remote workforces, or even for office-based teams spread out across the country, reducing switching costs is a likely boon to productivity while also reducing administrative management (think password sharing, getting licenses for various products, bill keeping, training, etc.).

Notion isn鈥檛 the only startup focusing on this problem, even if it is gathering the most attention among some of Silicon Valley鈥檚 venture class (dare we call them influencers?). , for instance, raised a to essentially merge Slack, Airtable, and under one application. (The joke that all of tech is just bundling, and unbundling, continues to hold.)

But is it a bet that will scale beyond freelancers and small teams to the enterprise, like Slack and Zoom have managed? Notion, after all, exists in a bit of a bubble. Remote and distributed work is not as popular as it may seem鈥攅ven most of the management in the Valley tends to eschew remote work in favor of centralized offices.

Furthermore, workflow foundations are hard to change. What a company chooses to start out with鈥攚hether that be Slack, Skype, Office 365, Zoom鈥攊s usually what they continue (or end) with. To convince businesses already entrenched in their workflows usually takes a sales person or two. Word of mouth, when valuations get this large, will only carry you so far. There is also little evidence that this merging of apps actually works.

Slack and Zoom took existing, known wins (chat and video chat) and turned them into high-growth businesses despite existing market competition. But Slack, for instance, has struggled to contain all business activity to its one app, even with a robust app ecosystem and goodwill from the third-party developers. In short: It鈥檚 a tall order to contain all business activity to one app, even for public SaaS companies with the cash to attempt it.

Yet in the case of Notion, those concerns may be overwrought given the stakes.

A Good Bet?

Well-known venture capitalist threw in his two cents concerning the matter on Twitter this morning, that while he doesn鈥檛 know Notion鈥檚 revenue base, the investment is a 鈥渂et鈥� that 鈥渃an only lose $10 [million],鈥� while he views the upside as high as $200 million.

From that perspective, congrats to the VCs who managed to get their capital into Notion. You won! Now the company has to grow into that valuation. Let鈥檚 see how long it takes.

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