SaaStr: A 3.8x Markup Delivered a 1.6x Actual Return — the Dilution Gap Nobody Prices In
SaaStr·medium signal
Jason Lemkin's July 31 post walks through a SaaStr Fund portfolio company whose headline valuation markup reached 3.8x while the realized return to investors was 1.6x, with subsequent-round dilution eating the difference. It is a useful counterweight to the funding announcements filling the rest of this week's news: paper valuations in AI-native SaaS are being set at step-ups that most cap tables will not survive intact. For founders raising into the current agent-infrastructure enthusiasm, the mechanical takeaway is that the round-over-round markup is not the number that determines outcome.