
Ep. #1043 - Startup Valuations, What Happened?
In today’s episode of Startup Hustle, the Matts are asking the question: what happened to startup valuations? If interested in the answers, join Matt DeCoursey and Matt Watson’s conversation. Also, discover effective strategies to increase your business’s valuations now!
Covered In This Episode
In business jargon, what does a “unicorn” mean? What is a market correction? Why do you need foresight when liquidating things for your business?
Learn all the must-know information about the market from Matt and Matt. This way, you can easily adjust your strategies when doing startup valuations.
Listen to their insights in this Startup Hustle episode.

Highlights
- What is a valuation? And why is it critical? (01:55)
- The reason why valuations are crazy high (05:00)
- What are ‘multiples’? (05:58)
- Going public amid a financial crisis (06:52)
- Timing is everything in increasing your valuation (09:00)
- About market correction, supply, and demand (11:42)
- What happens when businesses get overvalued? (13:37)
- High-interest prices on real estate (16:14)
- How geopolitical market and economic conditions affect valuation (18:15)
- Adapting to market demands and creating cheaper options (19:54)
- The trickle-down effect in venture capital funding (21:07)
- The psychology of most investors (22:26)
- High-interest rates and economics (24:00)
- Trends in the stock market (26:34)
- What to remember about startup valuations (27:50)
Key Quotes
It’s very difficult to pierce the veil of a dogshit stock market. It is. That’s why it’s going to be the lowest year for IPOs. Because a lot of people are just sitting on the sidelines, they’re like, we’re not putting our sales up until the winds blow.
– Matt DeCoursey
There’s gonna be a lot of losers because it’s a bad economy. But there will also be winners. There will be companies that are doing better than ever because of the economy.
– Matt Watson
To capitalize on the value and everything, you need to have enough foresight to liquidate things when they’re high. Because if all your money’s tied up and everything, you’re just along for the ride.
– Matt DeCoursey
So there will be money out there. But you never know. Some investors may need more money than they needed before. Because of the downturn, some VCs may make a little less investment.
– Matt Watson
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Rough Transcript
Following is an auto-generated text transcript of this episode. Apologies for any errors!
Matt DeCoursey 00:00
And we’re back! Back for another episode of Startup Hustle. Matt DeCoursey here with Matt Watson. Hi, Matt.
Matt Watson 00:07
What’s up, man?
Matt DeCoursey 00:09
Just sitting here. I’m like, what happened? Man, what happened? And I was so rich on paper. Now, I’m not.
Matt Watson 00:18
I just want you to know I really value you. Didn’t really value it. Oh, wait. Oh, I really appreciate you.
Matt DeCoursey 00:27
Thanks. Unfortunately, last time, I tried to cash that at the bank. They were really weird, and I was like, what, I’m loved. You know, what was loved? And now, is it startup valuation?
Matt Watson 00:43
Oh, wait a second. You automatically get a multiple of two. Because there are two, Matt.
Matt DeCoursey 00:52
You were pitching that. I don’t know about that. Today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult, and Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. If you’re sitting there going, what the hell are mountains now are we talking about? Okay, valuations of startups. Wow, wow, wow. That’s the sound they made in the second half of 2022. Now, I do want to say, prior to that pretty juicy period for quite a while. But pop, boom, bang, crash, however you want to look at it, is the sound that will go with many companies’ valuations. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about that. But before we get started, evaluation is a critical part of venture capital, initial public offerings, bringing in investors, sharing equity, and figuring out what your real, or somewhat make-believe, net worth might be. And so, with that, quite honestly, they’re in the shutter. But why Matt? Why?
Matt Watson 02:12
So, well, so many reasons. Well, when money was flowing everywhere, from all the stimulus, and the low-interest rates and everything else, you know, during 2020-2021, there was a lot of cheap money, right? Like, let’s say I had $5 million in the bank with Charles Schwab or whatever. I could borrow money against that at one or 2% interest or something crazy and go invest in startups or buy crypto or whatever I wanted to do. So the markets were hot, and there was cheap money running around?
Matt DeCoursey 02:39
Well, I’m in the trailing vapors of a hot stock market, and some people are on the good side of things like crypto. When you’re playing with the house money, it’s easier to spread that butter around. But you know, the one thing if you had asked me that question, I might say, they might have been overvalued. To start with. We went into that when we did our math in the not-so-distant past and a 52-part series on how to start a tech company. We talked a lot about valuations. And we both made comments, we’re like, how are some of these businesses getting the multiples? So the multiple is defined as that’s a lot of times how these valuations are almost always what they’re how they’re determined, and that’s a multiple or whatever, factor times a number. So in some cases, it might be your revenue for tech. It’s always usually annual recurring revenue or something like that times 10 Is your valuation. And oh my god, I’m a unicorn. What does that mean? Is my company worth a billion dollars? It feels like every single day forever, there are like three new unicorns.
Matt Watson 03:47
Or whenever I think of any of this, now I think of we work and just how it was, oh, boundedly stupid. And then let’s talk about that.
Matt DeCoursey 03:54
So we were somehow, at some point, gaining investment at a firm as high as a $47 billion valuation. They owned no assets. They rented most of those things. They didn’t even have proprietary technology that went with it. Where the hell was that common from the renting and Australia by cash-hungry investors. But here’s the thing, it was never really worth that much other than to a few people. Right? Well, it’s never been. It’s never made an initial public offering.
Matt Watson 04:25
Yeah, and you have other things, like the Tesla stock, that I’ve never understood. It always seemed way overvalued. And now you got these meme stocks like Gamestop and AMC theaters and stuff like that, where it’s like game stock now. Yeah, for whatever reason, the valuations are crazy high because the investors just make a lot of money trading them, they figured out how to make money trading it, but so GameStop, though, isn’t a startup like when we talk about startups, so lets you know, we’ve often poked fun at like, what Wall Street or the world woke.
Matt DeCoursey 04:47
Okay, so like the federal government says that until you have over 500 employees, you’re still a small business. Man, we don’t have a company that has 300 employees. There ain’t nothing small about it, and it feels small, right? Like Uber, Uber goes IPO, and the Wall Street Journal so refers to them as a startup that in the startup, when you’re the name of your company has become a verb, you are no longer a startup. So when you are Uber somewhere, in my opinion, you wouldn’t think that it was no longer a startup. Is that good? That’s a good place to start, right?
Matt Watson 05:26
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, back to your point earlier about multiples, I think you have two different ways to do it, right? You have multiples of EBITA or multiples of gross revenue. And, you know, a service company like Full Scale is going to be a totally different multiple than a SAS software company versus buying a bank, like how would a bank value it and big O based on deposits are based on profit, you know, they’re a totally different type of business you have is gonna be totally different.
Matt DeCoursey 05:56
So whether this exists on a large scale, and where you’re gonna see national media, and I keep referring to the Wall Street Journal, I mean, I do, like, I’m not gonna say it read the actual paper, but I subscribe to the app for years, I enjoy reading a lot of it. And the mainstream media will use Instacart. As an example. We’re recording this in the fourth quarter of 2022. So Instacart. So this is going to be the worst year since 2022 will be the same, and without a doubt going to be the worst year for initial public offerings since 2008, in the midst of a financial crisis. Yeah, because, well, a lot of companies aren’t doing an IPO because the market sucks, they are sketched out about a lot of stuff, and interest rates are the highest they’ve been since 2008. And then the valuation sucks.
Matt Watson 06:43
So people at Instacart are sitting there going like they got off, we don’t want to do this. They’re gonna have to sell shares at a discounted price or do something different.
Matt DeCoursey 06:46
So Instacart has cut its valuation by 40%, citing market turbulence due to Red Hot inflation and fear of a recession. So you can’t. It’s very difficult to pierce the veil of a dogshit stock market. It is. I mean, it is so, like, so that’s why it’s going to be the lowest year for IPOs. Because a lot of people are just sitting on the sidelines, they’re like, we’re gonna we’re not putting our sales up until the winds blow. You also have other things too. So then there’s the Okay. Oh, my God, how insurer tech looks, and right now because you get companies like lemonade that are trading five to 10 cents on the dollar compared to what they launched at. And certain industries and sectors get overvalued and hyped, and then they come back down to earth. And my God, when they do, it makes a thunderous crash.
Matt Watson 07:42
Well, that needs to happen sometimes, for sure. I mean, there were a lot of tech companies that were really, really overvalued. The multiples were crazy. And it makes it harder for startups, right. So if I’ve, you know, say, Take stock five, I will come here, for example, let’s pretend we’re doing $10 million in revenue, we will be trying to figure out, okay, what is this worth? And we were looking at comparables. We have competition that’s publicly traded. What are they trading at? What are their multiples in the public market? So if we’re trying to raise money in the private market, how do we compare? And if the public markets are totally wacky, it makes it harder for us to raise in the private market as well?
Matt DeCoursey 08:22
Yeah, it just sent shockwaves, and whether you want to call that a trickle-down effect, or trickle-down economics, or whatever, but so do this is a wild fact. So, okay, it really was a robust everything. Now, your terms, like the timing, are everything. You’re also going to see as these things change, and you mentioned Full Scale. Now Full Scale is actually a company that actually changed categories because you refer to Full Scale, which Matt and I own together. Go to FullScale.io to help you build a tech team. Alright. Anyway, with that, we started out only providing services. Now, over four years later, as we’ve evolved, we are now tech-enabled services because we got an amazing platform that helped us scale and do a lot of different things that changed the zip code for us, we have a different conversation with people that are interested, and it actually increased our valuation dramatically, but who gives a shit because Matt, you and I own 50% of the company, you can’t go to the Robin Hood app and buy $9 worth of Full Scale at least yet. Now, but this is wild. So in 2021, a record number of venture-backed companies went public at Big valuations. 238 companies debuted on public markets valued at 1 billion or more. That was up from 61 in 2020 to 30. Wow.
Matt Watson 10:03
So here’s the thing: in 2022, it’s going to be a record low, but robust years in front of that are going to bake the hay year over year. We’re down 90%, Maybe because that was like the world record.
Matt DeCoursey 10:05
But companies went public at 1 billion or more. And by the way, there’s probably a whole bunch that went at sub billion too.
Matt Watson 10:12
But here’s the thing, even in a bad economy, there’s gonna be there’re gonna be losers gonna be a lot of losers, because of the bad economy, but there will also be winners, there will be companies that are doing better than ever because of the economy the way it was. That was always the crazy part about origins, geopolitical conditions, or pandemics, like the pandemic at Full Scale, at first putting a big dent in our armor and then letting our fuse on our rocket ship because it changed the market conditions.
Matt DeCoursey 10:27
And we have people that are clients or companies that are clients with this now, that three years ago, we don’t do the remote thing. And now their whole team is remote. Yeah, it changes their outlook on it. You also have things like let Okay, let’s talk about Ed Tech for a second. Prior to the pandemic.
Matt Watson 11:01
I was talking to VCs and people and all that, and they’re like, Yeah, I’d text Dad. I’m over it. Its online education was not a pandemic hit, and then that became the hottest shit ever, anything Tella, anything that went remote and all of that. So yeah, winners and losers.
Matt DeCoursey 11:06
And then you’ll often hear the term market correction. In some cases, that’s like when things kind of come back down to earth, because realistically, the value of any stock price on Sundays is driven by hype. That was the game, game stock or Game Stop. The price shot up, that was just a weird supply and demand equilibrium thing and things getting hot and putting it in GameStop, as a company was certainly never worth $500 a share. Well, if they’re like a blockbuster of video games, but the public markets it really.
Matt Watson 11:52
And a lot of times none of the fundamentals matter at all. It’s really based on Are there more buyers than sellers? Do you just get a lot of people that are like, I want to own stock and Tesla, like I don’t care about any of the fundamentals. I just want to own stock and Tesla, right, that would mean it actually runs the price up.
Matt DeCoursey 12:10
I will do so. Just as you’re aware, I just got a Tesla. Yeah. And I like okay, I have had some nice cars. It has grossly exceeded all of my expectations with that. And being in and and as an entrepreneur, like I didn’t buy Tesla stock. Yeah, guess what? It went down because everything in the market went down. But that’s that I looked at something I was like, shit. This is a game changer. I mean, there’s nothing else like it. We have an electric Jeep as well. It has a 25 mile battery on it. Do ya? Like come on?
Matt Watson 12:42
Welcome to the dark side.
Matt DeCoursey 12:46
Yeah, there’s some wild numbers, people like Oh, venture money, slow down, valuation slow down. But the valuation remembers that it’s all vapor. It’s like you don’t have Tesla and don’t have a trillion dollars and assets. These things are based on, in the end, they have to come back down to Earth because it has to be based on something tangible in reality, that’s profit, dividends, assets, market share, etc. And that’s why when things get grossly overvalued, they turn into a bubble and pop.
Matt Watson 13:21
Sometimes things are overpriced for different reasons. So for example, Adobe buying figma got a lot of news for $20 billion. And anybody, they also acquired their biggest competitor. Yeah. And so that’s the thing when people look at that they’re like, why would you spend $20 billion, that’s crazy. Well, they compete, they just, it’s like they’re playing chess, and they just took their competitors Queen off the board. Like that was their biggest threat.
Matt DeCoursey 13:47
And they just moved headquarters Queen off the board, they took the white, the Black Queen and turned it into a white chess piece. And now it’s aimed against the rest of the board. Yes, it is no longer figma, it’s the other competition literally changing the entire game.
Matt Watson 14:01
Yeah. And so sometimes valuations are crazy crazy for that reason, or they’re very strategic, you know, somebody like Adobe could see figma and like, hey, we already charged people $99 a month for the Creative Suite or whatever, we can add this to it. And now we’re gonna get $109 or whatever. And they just see Ding, ding, ding, ding, and it’s very strategic.
Matt DeCoursey 14:21
Yeah, and there’s also a lot of things like that. We had a perfect storm with overpriced companies. And then money was so cheap, we gave a lot of it away in the United States, you could borrow it for next to nothing. And then you look at things like homes, suddenly they’re like, Dude, there’s nothing sustainable about the price of a home going up by 15 to 20% a year. That’s not natural. And that’s where bubbles occur. You coupled out with geopolitical tensions that exist in like Europe and other places, rising you know, all of it. That’s all. It all comes together and then oftentimes teams up and beats the shit out of your liquid or illiquid portfolio, your valuations, market conditions, but I think the thing that’s the most important is the confidence of consumers and investors.
Matt Watson 15:15
Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s a self fulfilling prophecy, right? So if all of us decide, Hey, I’m going to spend a few $100 less on Christmas presents, I’m not going to plan that vacation, I’m not going to do this thing. If all of us save, you know, $5,000, you know, that we would normally spend, but you got millions of people doing it takes a lot of money out of the economy. It’s just every, every little bit of that adds up.
Matt DeCoursey 15:40
Well, and that’s so okay. My wife and I had considered moving to a different home. It’s just one we’ve had for eight years. And like, I started even looking, and I’ve been looking and then all the sudden interest rates are double, and the prices are at the highest. Why is the Federal Reserve Bank raising interest rates because they need to cool that shit, because it’s not sustainable.
Matt Watson 16:02
And really you on the sideline, like you’re the guy, we don’t want to just try to buy the entry.
Matt DeCoursey 16:07
Mortgage rates are double what they were before. And then prices on houses are the highest they’ve ever been. And the combination of those two things is already driving the prices back down. But it’s also making me look at the existing place that I’m at. And I’m arguing you know why this place seems like a pretty good deal. Rather than buying a new house, I bought some new carpet and some paint.
Matt Watson 16:25
Well, that’s the thing is, it’s all trickled down, right. Because even if you were about that new house, you might have bought some new furniture, you hit my advice for new sheets, my advice for new this new, that’s the trouble at all.
Matt DeCoursey 16:34
And that all adds up to a depot that affects retailers that affects people that sell raw materials that affects trucking companies. All of this one, one of the things that really popped a lot of this off was a few months ago, FedEx announced that they saw their global shipping volume projecting over the next year in quarters to drop significantly. And that was a KPI. For a lot of investors to wait, they ship all this stuff to people. And that means that other things drop. And you know, and it’s time to look for value. And if you want to look for value, I want to remind everyone that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io where you can build a software team quickly and affordably use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs, and then see what available developers testers and leaders are ready to join your team FullScale.io Hey, Matt, you mentioned like geopolitical and market and economic conditions are inquiries. Okay, when you I do realistically believe that some of this current recession was a little self fulfilled, because man, we went from like a hot market and everything to like dogshit in a hurry. It’s because people were talking about it. But in a lot of keys you gotta look around, there are opportunities in these things. And that’s actually getting more people coming to Full Scale because like, we still need the people, we might need to save a few bucks, we need to be a little smarter about it. You have been on the show before talking about it so that the financial crisis of 2008 is one of the was one of the events or marks in the timeline that you’ve said in the past, you felt that that made your prior startup that you exited in 2012. They let it let the fuse on it because people car dealers needed to find cheaper solutions, right?
Matt Watson 18:27
Yeah. So that was 2008 2009, right. And so Chrysler and General Motors went bankrupt, Ford closed, like 1000 stores or something like that, right? And so we’re selling software to car dealerships at that time. And we’re all sitting around looking at each other, like what the hell is going to happen. But we were also in another major shift where these car dealers are spending a lot of money on advertising and magazines, newspapers, radio and TV, and traditional marketing. And we were in the right place at the right time to help them transition to online, or things like autotrader.com cars.com, eBay, Craigslist, all these things kind of became more of the norm, like who the hell gets a newspaper anymore, right? So back then they would spend like $20,000 A month or like crazy amounts of money advertising all these full page spreads and newspapers. So we were kind of in the right place at the right time for that. And the same thing, if you’re making a lot of money, people don’t worry as much about what they’re spending it on. They’re less concerned about pinching pennies. But as soon as the market tanks, everybody’s really interested, right? And we’re like, Hey, can we save money on this? Can you save money on that? You know, and we were a way that they could save money, not only on software fees, because we had a SAS base product that was cloud based, it was a low monthly cost. But we can also help them save a lot of money on advertising. They were trying to figure out how to get the same amount of leads, but get them through the digital then through traditional so we were in the right place at the right time. And I’m invested in another company that is that similar in automotive and they’re seeing the same thing right now their competition charges $5,000 a month. They Charge $2,500 a month. I get a lot of people that are like, You know what, we’ve looked at your product for a long time. But now we want to save 2500 bucks a month. Now’s the time.
Matt DeCoursey 20:09
Yeah. And that’s the thing that drives people to savings and like, once again during times that things are going well, why aren’t you just kind of keep doing the same you don’t pay attention to things and opportunities start shrinking, you look for stuff but but yeah, there’s always winners and losers in the whole thing. Now. The thing that has started valuations that are maybe impacting people that are listeners of the show are keeping up with it as there is a trickle down effect when it comes to VC funding. And that’s probably the more impactful thing. And then, in the startup community for businesses, I actually consider startups meaning like the person raising, raising a seed round person looking for a $3 million series A stuff like that. Investors during times like this, do often take a step back, and they’re like, Hey, I’m gonna preserve some dry powder for later. Some of that it’s also a mentality of okay, it was so bad if stock and Startup Hustle, the Startup Hustle podcast, it was $100. And then it was 90, and then it was 80. And you’re like, Hmm, I mean, why would I want to buy today? It’s going down. I mean, it’s on sale, so that these things do kind of hit a bottom and then oftentimes do that kind of like a little V cup thing and kind of head back up. Because, well, two things. One, there’s value to be found in times like this. And also, I just don’t believe that venture capitals, venture capitalists and funds and firms realistically have enough realistic self discipline to sit on the sidelines forever. They got to put the money out there eventually. But it doesn’t always have to be fast.
Matt Watson 21:48
Well, the problem is the psychology of most investors is totally backwards, right? When something like Bitcoin is at an all time high. There’s euphoria. And everybody wants to buy it when it’s $60,000. But now that it’s at $19,000, and yeah, like you’re saying, it’s on and there’s Klein, nobody wants to buy it. But the reality is, this is where millions and billions are made, is that people that accumulate in the down market. So as the stock market stock markets come down, Kryptos comes down the NASDAQ. All of it, right, everything is 20% off.
Matt DeCoursey 22:20
What’s the stock thing? That was stocks? Isn’t that isn’t that a term? That’s like a Reddit kind of term, right? Yeah. For GameStop. There’s an interesting world out there when it comes to this stuff. It really is now.
Matt Watson 22:40
Sorry, you kind of stomped it on that one, maybe I’ll APEN on the next part of this oh my god, dude, I look back at like, the last couple years.
Matt DeCoursey 22:42
And like, I mean, honestly, it’s sometimes the dust has to settle for me to like really be like, What the fuck? Like, like NF T’s are dead. Like, I mean, it’s but but a year ago, people were selling JPEGs of apes for a million dollars. And some of that stuff hangs on to some value, but really in the end, like I think that times like this are highly Darwinistic they are you know, they call it the law of economics let’s what are some other things that are quote, law, the law of gravity, these are things that are overpowering you the law of supply and demand that you can’t overcome, because market conditions can only only support so much and but with these Darwinistic trends, so Okay, so let’s go back to 2008 which financial crisis housing bubble whatever, it was due for a HUGE CORRECTION because at the time it was kind of like recently, fucking houses were going, Dude, I bought a house in North Carolina’s first house I bought and I sold it two years later, above 140 grand and I sold it two years later for 225 good deals love to get returns like that right now. I’m anything right? But that wasn’t sustainable. That wasn’t yet priced things out. So some of that stuff has to come back and the crazier it gets out of whack, the bigger the pop right.
Matt Watson 24:05
It was it honestly it was so insane that that mortgage rates and all that stuff were like 2% 3% How have those banks even make any money at that at that right like government wants failed?
Matt DeCoursey 24:16
That wasn’t the bank that failed it was the government that failed which is why they are the crazy part about this.
Matt Watson 24:26
They fed it but it killed the bond market. It killed a lot of investors that would do things like fixed interest rate type investments that couldn’t make any money for a long time like having a savings account that gives you point oh 1% interest in a savings account like it was all insane none of that made any sense. So it’s good that we’re getting back to something that makes sense. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to put money in a savings account and actually get interest like it. That’s the way it should be.
Matt DeCoursey 24:51
That’s yeah, that’s weird cuz realistically over the last few years I get I don’t keep a ton of money in a checking account for that reason doesn’t give any reason Aren’t you like, you get like a 1099 i at the end of the year, and it’s for like $14, you’re like.
Matt Watson 25:08
Wow, you had to have a lot of money to even get $14. The interest is so low.
Matt DeCoursey 25:17
Because I just roll I roll in liquid, but not necessarily true. Now, by the way, the thing that you mentioned, though, to capitalize on value and everything, you either need to have enough foresight to liquidate things when they’re high. Because if all your money’s tied up and everything, like you’re just along for the ride, which must be, yeah, that’s the thing. So you talk about, like, there’s billions to be made, you know, the Warren Buffett’s and people like that, they keep a hell of a lot of dry powder and cash on the side. And they just sit and wait and wait and wait, where they leverage up. And I’ll give you an example. And the trends that go with this. So we’re talking in the stock market, and we’re supposed to be talking about startup valuations, we look at a company like Google, which at the time of this recording is about 100 bucks a share. Realistically, it should be like 170. So you know, like a fair market value compared to what you know, normal conditions might come in, so that’s an example of where and I’m not saying go by it. This is not financial advice. But you look at stuff like that. And tight when you’re at the bottom of the trough. People are out there’s a lot of value hunters out there and unfortunately, you know, we always joke mountain I off air will often Joe for like, yeah, you’re supposed to buy high and sell low, right? So many people house crypto on that. You know, that’s the psychology though. Yeah, well, it’s because it feels like it’s going up and that there’s that fear of that FOMO kicks in and you’re like, oh, it’s got a new bottom and whatever. I mean, dude, in the last since we’ve started this podcast, I’ve seen Bitcoin be from 1500 to 65,000.
Matt Watson 26:58
Yeah. And now 19.
Matt DeCoursey 27:01
Yeah, I buy high and sell crypto.
Matt Watson 27:06
But most people do and
Matt DeCoursey 27:08
I can’t make $1 on it. It’s cuz I yeah, I’m in that same boat, you know? All right. So I mean, overall, man, when it comes to start evaluations, like some I mean, some of these will bounce back. I think the thing that’s important to remember is if you have a solid business that solves a problem we’re solving and does it in a way that makes sense. I don’t think this thing I don’t think this is a big deal for you. Right? Like there’s money to be found. There are investors looking for that. There are people that want to jump on board. Now, if you’re Instacart. And dude, if the founders and major shit stock shareholders of Instacart are regular listeners on the show, please present yourself because we’d like to have you on the show. But probably not. Right. So for the real people, I mean, that are trying to get funded and trying to build a business, I still think that even though market conditions are challenging. I mean, there’s still money to be had out there. I mean, Matt, Matt, what are some comments you have on the way out.
Matt Watson 28:07
I think there will always be money running around, you’re gonna have people like you, you’re like, Oh, I thought about buying this house. But now, maybe I’ve got a lot more dry powder. So maybe I would invest in startups, or I’d buy a little more crypto or whatever like people are still going to have money to put to use that may be sitting on the sidelines and not putting in the stock market. So there will be money out there. But you never know. Some investors may need more money than they needed before. Because of the downturn, some VCs may make a little less investment, so then they save a little more money to follow on investments because I know some previous investments are going to need it now. So it’s really hard to know how the market will determine what’s going to happen here, but they’re still going to be money floating around as a point for Jim.
Matt DeCoursey 28:54
My closing comments are a quick reminder that says I’ve so Startup Hustle was powered by FullScale.io, helping you build a software team quickly and affordably. We have the people on the platform in the process to help you get it done. We specialize in experienced, vetted software engineers, testers, and leaders. Hey, you’re looking for value. And affordability. It’s kind of what we do. So, you know, Matt, on the way out, like I said, I think that this is a really wide topic. And you know, like, when I think of startups, I’m not thinking of Instacart. I’m thinking of, like, the process of the Full Scale prospect that I talked to you about that raised 3 million in the capital in a seed round. And I and, as I mentioned, I think that you’re that if that’s where you’re at with your business, by the time you, if you can even make it to be like an IPO kind of company. And you still have a ways to go. So these things can change quickly. That can change over time. But really, if you’re creating value, creating value, creating sustainability, creating profitability, the people that Are Futch right now are the people that have the businesses that seem to just be in the business of raising money because when it dries up, they dry up. If you have a profitable business that’s sustainable, that’s run in responsible and reasonable ways, kind of just get moving through these things. So keep on keeping on until they find out that you’re out of money. You’re not just going to keep looking for it and find the right places to trust me. Someone is getting a huge funding check today. Probably to record this speaking to ride the wave. I’m going to try and get funded, I think, or maybe to go buy some stuff. It’s on sale, right?
Matt Watson 30:41
Yes.
Matt DeCoursey 30:43
I’m gonna go to work on buying some Instacart NFTs. Positive that my household alone is going to make that profitable.
Matt Watson 30:51
Trying to, but I’m out. See you.