These 44 founders have lost half of their wealth and are about $100 billion poorer than they were a year ago. Twelve are no longer billionaires.
by Dioro died
theThis past January, credit card startup Brex raised $300 million from a series of A-list investors, nearly doubling the company’s valuation to $12.3 billion and making its Brazilian co-founders- 26-year-old Pedro Franceschi and 27-year-old Henrique Dubogras– The youngest self-made billionaires in the world.
“I think it’s easy for people to think that we’re already successful,” said DuBogras. Forbes in time. “We are, and we’re not. We’re obviously happy with what we’ve achieved, but there’s a lot more to come.”
It is certainly too early to write off the long-term success story that might be Brexit. But after a year, Forbes It is estimated that the company’s value has fallen to $6.4 billion – nearly 50% less than in the past 12 months. Meanwhile, Franceschi and Dubograsse are no longer billionaires — each is estimated to be worth around $900 million, down from $1.5 billion.
Biggest losers
These unicorn founders’ fortunes have fallen the most since March.
Sources: Unicorn ratings based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as reports by Forbes.
They are in good company. In March 2022, near the height of the startup funding frenzy, the combined wealth of the 44 unicorn founders — private companies valued at more than $1 billion — totaled $190 billion, according to Forbes estimates. A year later, with cryptocurrencies in decline and private markets going the way of their public counterparts, Forbes– In consultation with prominent venture capitalists, investors and data providers – reassess unicorns backed by the world’s billionaires. The results are stark: half the fortune of the billionaires behind unicorns has been wiped out, leaving this elite group of emerging visionaries $96 billion poorer than they were a year ago. Twelve of them are no longer billionaires. This excludes the dozens of Chinese unicorn founders who are facing their own unique set of issues (political and otherwise).
Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, says of the run-up to a summit bubble. “I think it’s going to require a little bit of a detox, because in the adventure world, people are getting pretty drunk on it, and everyone needs to get off the evaluation drug. It’s over, it’s over and it’s not coming back, so let’s get back to the things that make more sense historically.” And we’re refocusing on building great businesses in a way that’s more operationally efficient.”
Some unicorns have already cut their own ratings. Online payment company Checkout.com began preemptively lowering its internal markup to $11 billion in December, after investors valued the company at $40 billion in January 2022. That destroyed the fortune of its Swiss founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz, briefly the richest Entrepreneur in Europe in technology, $7.2 billion out of $23 billion.
They are no longer billionaires
Billionaires in March, these dozens of entrepreneurs have since fallen below the cuts.
Sources: Unicorn ratings based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as reports by Forbes.
Irish payments giant Stripe, founded and run by brothers Patrick and John Collison, did the same, lowering its internal valuation on at least three occasions to $63 billion this month, after investors valued the company at $95 billion in March 2021. The brothers are now worth $6.9 billion apiece, down from $9.5 billion. Apoorva Mehta’s Instacart and Ali Godse’s Databricks also distinguished themselves in October.
Swedish buy-now-pay-later startup Klarna, co-founded by former billionaires Viktor Jacobson and Sebastian Simiatkowski (valued at $600m and $500m, respectively — down from $4bn and $3.2bn), was the only company whose co-founders Forbes Billionaires List has already put together a new round at a lower valuation – the so-called “lower round” – that revalued the company at $6.7 billion in July 2022, after raising it at a staggering $45.6 billion valuation just nine months earlier.
But half a dozen companies were the exceptions. “Everyone hides behind a two-to-three-year runway that they got with the money they made and avoid those bottom rounds,” says Murphy of Menlo Ventures. “It’s been a year since this now, and if you [venture-backed] Company, you don’t want to go down to less than a year or less than six months worth of cash. Therefore, we believe that the market should rebound later this year.”
Murphy says that layoffs are one way “companies are given rights to make their money last longer.” Among the unicorns to cut staff: 26-year-old Alexander Wang, Cameron’s cryptocurrency exchange, Tyler Winklevoss, Gemini, as well as Brex, Klarna, and Stripe.
full list
Forbes has reassessed the fortunes of these 44 unicorn founders.
Sources: Unicorn ratings based on pricing data provided by ApeVue, Caplight Technologies and Notice, as well as reports by Forbes.
So far, Forbes Evaluate venture capital-backed companies by taking the valuation from the last funding round, regardless of when it was, usually discounted by 10% due to lack of liquidity and financial transparency. the new Forbes The project-backed company valuations methodology brings it more in line with the recent turmoil in the public markets and the massive internal and external writedowns that these unicorns face.
If a company raised money in the last three months, like Michael Rubin’s online retailer Fanatics or Palmer Luckey’s defense startup Anduril, Forbes It used its most recent valuation from that funding round. In the absence of recent funding rounds or internal write-offs, Forbes Worked with three private market pricing data providers-ApeVueAnd Caplight Technologies And Notice— to revalue the 30 unicorns that account for the bulk of the fortunes of billionaires (and ex-billionaires). in most cases, Forbes The average of data providers’ current valuation estimates for each unicorn, which are based on the performance of comparable public companies, secondary market activity, and publicly announced mutual fund brands. Based on this analysis, Forbes It is estimated that there are now 32 rhino billionaires outside of China, down from 44 in March, who have a combined wealth of $94 billion.
Not everyone agrees with our new approach. when it was said Forbes It has reduced the valuation of UK fintech Revolut to $13.8 billion (from $33 billion) and the fortunes of its founders Nick Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko to $3.3 billion (from $7.1 billion) and $500 million (from $1.1 billion), the response his spokesperson. “We do not engage in speculation on our valuation. Since our last funding round, which was $33 billion, Revolut’s profitable business has continued to perform strongly in all markets around the world.”
Of course, how much a unicorn is worth has real-world consequences for these companies that go beyond the fortunes of their creators. “Whether the founder is a billionaire or not is probably no longer the most important thing to them, unless their level is raised significantly against them.” [previously] says venture capitalist Eric Paley of the Founder Collective. There is ego involved in all of this, but the bigger problem is displacement and a crisis of confidence. In a way, it’s psychological, because I think you had better climb from a $1 billion valuation to a $5 billion valuation, than to go from $1 billion to $10 billion and back to $5 billion.”
“Now all of your employees’ options are underwater and they may decide to go somewhere else that they think is up rather than down,” adds Bali. Similarly, investors might look at it like, “Who wants to be an investor in that company?” “All of these people are struggling with what the company was and they’re tied to that in their minds.”
Note: This story was updated at 12 noon EST on January 27, 2023 to distinguish the internal ratings of Checkout.com and Stripe from the ratings assigned to them by external investors.
Image credits
Biggest losers
Sam Bankman-Fried: Anthony Behar Siba/USA News. Busaz clouds: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images. Nick Storonsky: Harry Murphy/SPORTSFILE FOR THE WEB SUMMIT/Getty Images. Barry Silbert: Joe Bugliewicz/Bloomberg. Cameron Winklevoss: Michael Prince Forbes. Tyler Winklevoss: Michael Prince Forbes. Cliff Obrecht: Canva. Melanie Perkins: DAVID FITZGERALD/SPORTFILE WEB SUMMIT/GETTY IMAGES.
There are no billionaires anymore
Alexander Wang: Christy Hemme Clock Forbes. Henrique Dubograss: Kelly Sullivan/TECHCRUNCH/GETTYIMAGES. Pedro Franceschi: brix. Prasanna Sankar: rip. Alex Atallah: Sasha Maslow Forbes. Devin Fenzer: Sasha Maslow Forbes. Sebastian Simiatkovsky: Klarna. Barry Silbert: Joe Bugliewicz/Bloomberg. Sam Bankman-Fried: Tom Williams/CQ-ROLL CALL, INC/GETTY IMAGES.