You should see the financials from some Indian unicorns that raised hundreds of millions in 2020-22. $5-6M in revenue, $50M in expenses. No money anywhere.
VCs were way too exuberant and founders were more than happy to mop up the capital.
And here I was, working with a startup that had difficulty landing $500K. It was my first foray into being a founder, but I learned that I do not understand the investing landscape at all.
Matt Levine of Bloomberg has a quote about Adam Neumann that is just... amazing. It's about selling in a sellers market and basically about how he sold We Work shares to Softbank (and taking money out of it).
I see stocks as fundamentally two things. A statistical thing (something that tracks the underlying fundamentals of a business, and a probability (a belief in that company). Yes, this alludes to classical frequentist statistics vs Bayesian statistics interpretations.
VCs were way too exuberant and founders were more than happy to mop up the capital.