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Airtable was once valued at $11B. This week, it sold for roughly a tenth of that.

That doesn't mean Airtable suddenly lost 90% of its value. It means someone finally had to put a price on it.

Private markets don't reprice when the market changes. They reprice when someone has to transact.

Airtable (Slow III) sold to Bending Spoons this week. At its peak, the company was valued around $11B. The reported sale price is roughly a 10x markdown from that peak.

The structure is more interesting than the number.

Bending Spoons gets the legacy Airtable business and runs it as an operating company. Founder Howie Liu moves on to a new AI company, with existing investors retaining exposure to the new entity.

Slow was a seed investor. Sam led the $3M investment at Slow in 2012, a larger check than we normally wrote at the time (Sam expands on this on More or Less), and sold portions of our position across subsequent rounds. We did well on the investment.

Which is partly the point…

Public software repriced years ago but private software mostly didn't.

Public companies have a stock price that tells you what they're worth everyday. Private companies only tells you what they were worth the last time everyone agreed it was useful to know.

For the last few years, that distinction mattered.

A generation of SaaS companies raised at valuations set when growth was expensive, software margins, and application software deserved premium multiples. The market changed. The marks mostly didn't.

Yoni has been writing about why the underlying asset changed since February. The three pillars the category was built on: zero marginal cost, non-ephemeral value and high switching cost. “AI degrades all three.Marginal costs go up with inference. Value depreciates faster as new tools improve rapidly…” Keep reading

“The threat to software is not demand destruction. It’s inference costs, competition, and commodification. Every line of the income statement gets hit…” Keep reading

That is what an $11B mark falling to roughly a tenth of it looks like when it finally clears. Not a compnay failing but a category being re-underwritten as an income stream instead of a compounder.

Now transactions are forcing price discovery. Airtable is one of the clearest examples yet: moving from public comps into private outcomes.

An $11B valuation and a roughly 10x-lower exit can describe the exact same company.

The difference is that o is a transaction.

And the outcome for any s much less on the headline valuation than on when they invested, what they paid, and whether they sold anything along

Will made the structural argument in July, looking at the same gap from the other end.

"Everyone loves to talk about that as venture capital changing. It isn’t. It’s just a wall that moved (keep reading)."

Value that used to be realized in public markets now accrues privately — as marks.

That's why venture's supposed "liquidity problem" is more complicated than it looks.

Venture doesn't have a liquidity preference.

For years, taking liquid price below the last preferred mark. Not selling allowed everyone to keep carrying the higher number.

This isn't a new…

Will said the quiet part fully out loud this week: “If DPI really mattered, we'd have lots of DPI… If folks really cared, they'd have demanded it by now… There are plenty of ways to get liquidity. You just might not like the bid… Better to hold the number than take the money…” Keep reading

Airtable probably won't be unique.

We expect to see more transactions that look something like this: sell the mature SaaS asset to an operator, let the founder and key team start again around AI, and give existing investors some exposure to the new company.

It's a fairly rational solution to an awkward problem.

There are good software businesses built during the last cycle that may never grow back into their 2021 valuations. But they still have customers, revenue, and cash flow. They're just worth less than the last financing round said they were.

You can read more about Yoni’s POV on where those businesses end up here. If cheap code killed software, offshoring would have done it already.

Someone will own those businesses.

Someone else will start the next thing.

And slowly, one transaction at a time, the private market will figure out what SaaS is actually worth.