As I said earlier, there are also helpful investors who are willing to buy stock at high valuations. Which means those who aren't have a lower ratio of value to cost.
And lowering one's valuation is not an automatic way to make a round close faster. I've watched literally hundreds of startups both succeed and fail at raising money, and as a rule, if investors don't want to invest at a valuation of x, they don't want to invest at x/2 either.
All that's really going on here is that Chris is mistakenly generalizing from a single data point.
Makes sense. If you don't think a company is going to succeed at a particular valuation, you're not likely to change your mind for half the cost.
My assumption was that there's a group of investors that would love to invest, but just don't have sufficient capital to do so at the valuations companies are getting. But I guess that's too small a number -- especially when you consider that you want quality investors, too, which shrinks that pool -- to be a general solution, as you say.
And lowering one's valuation is not an automatic way to make a round close faster. I've watched literally hundreds of startups both succeed and fail at raising money, and as a rule, if investors don't want to invest at a valuation of x, they don't want to invest at x/2 either.
All that's really going on here is that Chris is mistakenly generalizing from a single data point.