Valuation & Deal Math

Valuation is part analysis and part negotiation. This course walks through the main frameworks practitioners use — discounted cash flow, trading comparables, precedent transactions, and the venture capital method — and then turns to the arithmetic that decides who owns what after a financing: pre- and post-money valuation, option pools, dilution, SAFE and convertible note conversion, and liquidation preferences. The final lesson places that toolkit in the late-2026 market, using the Federal Reserve's recent policy statements, current Treasury yields, NYU Stern's Aswath Damodaran's datasets, and the Q3 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The material is educational and is not investment, legal, or tax advice.

What you’ll learn

• Explain when intrinsic, relative, and venture valuation methods are used and why they can disagree
• Build the logic of a DCF: free cash flow, terminal value, and a weighted average cost of capital tied to current rates
• Move between enterprise value and equity value and read EV/EBITDA and EV/Revenue multiples critically
• Work through a cap table from SAFE to priced round, including option pool and dilution math
• Describe how liquidation preferences change payouts at different exit values
• Put headline 2026 venture valuations in context using primary market data