Comment by manquer

Perhaps it as combination of how much founders were diluted and how much they are being offered upfront. We are hearing about $100M signing bonuses.

It is hard to say no when Google/Meta gives you say $100M upfront and hundreds more if not Billion+ in RSUs. After 3 rounds it is not unreasonable to have only 5-10%.

10% of a company worth a few billion burning a lot of cash, that needs to keep raising more rounds i.e more dilution, may have less value than RSUs from multi-trillion dollar publicly traded liquid tech company today.

It is also quite hard to raise $5-10+Billion in cash. There are only handful of startups which have ever done so

Very few funds/investors can afford to do so large rounds. This was SoftBank's thesis for most of last decade, compete by just outfunding competing products in a market.