Comment by JumpCrisscross
20 hours ago
> google launched at i dunno a 1bn market cap and grew as the internet grew
Google closed its first trading day "worth more than $25 billion" [1] with $1.5bn revenues, up 234% from 2002's $440mm [2]. That's a 16x revenue multiple, 0.07 growth adjusted [3].
On a similar revenue multiple, Anthropic's $16.3bn half-year earnings are worth $543 billion. Adjust for Anthropic's 1,400% YoY growth and you're well over $3 trillion.
Obviously, it's a lot harder to grow at a thousand percent from a $16bn baseline versus a few billion. But purely on a multiple basis, Anthropic is in a similar ballpark as Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/shares-of-goog...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
If only it was that simple, to switch multiples around between random companies and come up with valuations
Google was profitable, free cash flow positive and had no debts basically
Anthropic is burning money by the millisecond, no profits, free cash flow negative and has lots of debts & commitments
Correct does that poster actually know what comparables are?
Comparables are not by peer group or sector.
It’s cash flows, growth and risk bud. If you want to do peer group - go ahead - just don’t forget to control for differences..
Price to sales multiples are internally inconsistent by definition.
Is there an internet rule for folks asking if someone else knows something following it with a completely wrong definition of that thing?
As another check, SpaceX is trading at ~62x sales with a growth rate in the 30% range. Assigning the same sales multiple puts Anthropic at ~$2T market cap. Add in a factor for much faster growth (and non-GAAP profitability) and $3T is a really easy place to end up.
Sure, you can throw any numbers around, if you wish to get any valuation you want.
In reality, a valuation based on revenue (sales) is bonkers to begin with, but even worse when you consider that Anthropic has so much debt that it doesn't have positive equity value, it's in a deficit ("When liabilities attached to an asset exceed its value, the difference is called a deficit and the asset is informally said to be "underwater" or "upside-down""). At least SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.
There are a set of mistakes in what you wrote, but
> SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.
is definitely a choice thing to write on the day SpaceX announced a $40B debt deal to purchase compute to run other companies' models. Based on available information, this will put SpaceX into a place where it has more liabilities than assets.
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If your hyper growth startup does not have more liabilities than assets, it has fucked up.
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