Hi! I’m glad you’re here. You’ve made it to issue #10 of VC Demystified🪄.

My name’s Nicole - I’m a Principal at an early stage venture fund, and I know firsthand that VC can often be a black box. Breaking into the industry may feel daunting and resources can seem scarce and inaccessible. I wanted to put together a newsletter to give others the playbook I wish I had when I first started.

We now have 2.8K+ of you receiving this each week! And I’d love to get to know you better 👇🏼

My personal mission is to open as many doors as possible for other people and this newsletter is just one avenue to do that. As always, I will continue to post VC insights daily across my socials for those of you who prefer those channels.

As a refresh, in last week’s post, I walked you through, at a high-level, how to calculate an exit multiple by performing a public comparables (comps) benchmarking analysis. Let me remind you why this is important:

VCs decide to invest or pass on an investment based on the exit potential of a startup. After all, a VCs #1 goal is to “return the fund” for their Limited Partners.

At the early stages, it can be hard to project out a startups exit value. There are simple models that some VCs use to do that.

What’s most important to note is there are two major levers that drive startup exit values:
(1) Exit revenue
(2) Exit multiple

So understanding how to calculate an exit multiple is crucial in truly evaluating whether you’re making a good investment into a startup or not.

I want to make it even easier for you to perform this analysis by yourself with a real life example. Telling (my last post) is great, but showing (this post) is more important.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the 7 steps I would take to perform a public comps benchmarking analysis on a beverage startup. I share screenshots of exactly how and where to pull the data needed for a public comps analysis utilizing both paid and free platforms.

If you have this post, I guarantee you will be able to do any public comps analysis with ease.

Let’s get into it!