Startup Valuation Brief

⚠️ **Finance warning / Avertissement finance** : informational only, not investment advice. Early stage valuation is a negotiation framed by evidence, not a measurement: most early stage companies fail or return little, there is a real risk of loss of the whole investment, and no range here is a promise of return or of what a buyer or investor will pay. Curated by Skill Harbor: the startup valuation brief skill at the root of andreworia/claude-finance-skills, a short and deliberately disciplined skill. Use it when an early stage company needs a supportable valuation discussion. It starts by establishing the frame before any method runs: the purpose of the valuation, its date, the currency, the stage, the capital structure and what information is actually available, and it keeps the distinctions that early stage talks routinely blur strictly separate, enterprise value versus equity value, pre-money versus post-money, and a convertible valuation cap versus a priced valuation. Method selection is then driven by the data: the brief selects the methods the available data can support and explains why the rejected alternatives were rejected, rather than running every method and averaging the answers. For a discounted cash flow it requires the full assumption set to be disclosed, revenue, margin, reinvestment, discount rate, terminal growth and survival assumptions, and it forbids presenting a mechanically precise result as certainty. For comparable methods it requires sourced and dated metrics and disclosure of the selection limitations, because a multiple pulled from a different stage or market is decoration, not evidence. Where relevant it bridges enterprise value to equity value with cash, debt and other claims, and the deliverable is a method selection memo, an assumptions ledger and a defensible scenario range with sensitivity and an evidence ledger behind it. The honesty rule is the point of the skill: if material data is absent, it returns a preparation plan or illustrative scenarios explicitly labelled as such, never a fabricated valuation. From the andreworia/claude-finance-skills repository (MIT), where the skill file works with its bundled reference templates. Honest caveats: the company financials, cap table and comparable evidence are yours to supply and to verify; a supportable range still leaves the negotiation to the parties, and tax or legal valuation requirements for a specific transaction sit with qualified professionals. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use.