The investors backed down; wedid another round of funding at a reasonable valuation; the giantcompany finally gave us a piece of paper saying they didnt own oursoftware; and six months later we were bought by Yahoo for muchmore than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. Back in 1998 our CFOtried to talk me into it. Hard, but doable. MORE >>

As we do so, keep in mind that the relevant bubble statistic is not valuation. It’s the valuation:value ratio. High valuations are fine if the underlying value is there. In the great bubble of 1998-2000, the boom in public valuations mirrored the boom in private valuations. I’m going back to Cali, Cali, Cali. MORE >>

The Search War In 1998 while AOL, Excite, MSN, Yahoo! And there is another little company out of Chicago called GroupOn with a $15 billion valuation that is in the scrap too. There have been quite a few wars in the history of the commercial Internet. But I think that we are gearing up for the start of the biggest one yet in 2011. MORE >>

Sure, your revenues and profits will factor into your valuation, but what about things like: The quality of your team: do you have well trained employees that expertly perform? Like self-made billionaire Meg Whitman, who ran eBay from 1998 to 2007. Hewlett-Packard's new CEO, Meg Whitman, will receive an annual salary of just $1. MORE >>

for all u nosebleed-valuation VCs jockeying to finance the dorky geniusues at FourSquare, GoWalla, MyTown, and every LBS vendor / app developer out there, it's time to face the music. Master of 500 Hats A blog about Geeks, Entrepreneurs, & Startups in Silicon Valley, by Dave McClure. The Internet Revolution, Act III. Part II! er, Dorsey. MORE >>