Engineers are being misled by companies playing games with metrics. One company claims "$80M ARR, valued at $1.5B."
Look closer:
- "$80M ARR" = last month's usage billing × 12. No contracts.
- 75%+ of that revenue appears to pass-through to other providers.
- "$1.5B valuation" = an acquisition offer they say they received. No transaction at that price.
The honest pitch would be:
"We're at ~$18M of annualized net revenue and grew 20% last month."
That's a great business.
Why pretend it's something else?