Thoughts on using a staggered discount rate in a DCF to value a growth company?
For e.g. over a 10 year horizon using 15% for the last 5 years and 25% for the first 5 - the idea is that the company is significantly derisked in the first 5 years
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Personally, I haven’t seen DCF used in any venture capital-funded companies, even later stage ones. It’s generally not done because of the unpredictable nature of the company (it’s fluctuating YoY top line growth, changes to gross margins (hopefully improvements over time), and opex…) makes it difficult to forecast its cash flows. Garbage in, garbage out.
The only time I’ve seen it is from bankers (not the investors) that were hired say to help with fundraising a round or to explore a sale. And I’ve seen some bankers run a DCF even on fairly early stage companies, which elicits some eye rolls. They’re kinda doing it for the sake of doing something to appear useful. (I’m saying this as an ex banker).
You generally use comps and precedent transactions for VC and growth equity-VC companies. Maybe you could make a case for growth equity-PE companies (firms that are growing 10-20%ish yoy, are EBITDA positive or approaching it), but I still think DCF is just a lot of guess work in those cases too, and it’d just be a supplementary exercise. I would still use comps here, coupled with an LBO / IRR analysis against a range of comps (sensitivity) if you’re also looking at it from an investment standpoint.
Not really speaking from a VC perspecitve, but IB:
WACC has risen in our sell-side models from 7%-9% to around 15%, so for buy side ca. 18%-20% can be quite reasonable, depending on industry ofc.
25% sound kind highish tho
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