Miro just sold for $1.35 billion. That's a massive exit by any standard—except it comes after a previous $17.5 billion valuation. The 92% markdown tells a brutal story about how fast paper valuations evaporate when fundamentals shift. But here's what matters more: despite the correction, Miro still built something valuable enough to command over a billion dollars.
For founders, this isn't a cautionary tale about avoiding venture capital. It's a reminder that working products create optionality. When markets turn, vaporware dies. Functioning software with real users still has a path forward.
The Valuation Rollercoaster Is Real
Miro's journey mirrors dozens of companies caught in the 2020-2021 funding frenzy. When capital was infinite and multiples were disconnected from revenue fundamentals, private companies raised at stratospheric numbers. Those valuations weren't lies—they reflected genuine investor appetite at that moment. But they were forward-looking bets on exponential growth that never materialized at the expected pace.
The 2022-2024 correction brought reality back. SaaS multiples compressed. Growth-at-all-costs fell out of favor. Profitability and capital efficiency became the new religion. Companies that raised at peak valuations faced a choice: raise down rounds, sell for less than the last mark, or grind toward sustainable unit economics.
Miro chose the exit. And crucially, they had the exit option because they'd built a real product with millions of users and genuine enterprise adoption. The product worked. The infrastructure scaled. The integrations were deep enough that switching costs kept customers around.
What Founders Should Learn From This
1. Your valuation isn't your value. Valuation is a negotiation at a point in time. Value is what someone actually pays when you need liquidity. Build for the latter.
2. Working products create leverage. Miro didn't collapse to zero. They had a functioning business worth over a billion dollars because the software shipped, worked, and served real customers. If they'd spent those years on endless prototypes and repositioning, there would be no exit.
3. Speed to working product matters more than ever. The window between "we should build this" and "the market moved on" is getting shorter. If you spend 18 months building before launch, you're betting that the competitive landscape won't shift beneath you. That's a losing bet in 2025.
The Meta Muse Reality Check
Speaking of speed: Meta just shipped Muse, giving every user a free virtual machine with serious compute at an estimated cost of $3-4 per user. For founders building products that rely on providing AI compute environments, this is your competitive nightmare.
If your MVP is "we give developers AI access," you're now competing with platforms that own the infrastructure and can subsidize or eliminate costs you have to charge for. Your only defense is to build something Meta won't build: proprietary vertical workflows, data moats, integrations that create lock-in, or domain expertise that makes generic compute insufficient.
This is why the "build fast, ship working product" approach matters. You need to prove your differentiation before the platforms commoditize your layer. If you're still in stealth mode perfecting your prototype, someone else is already serving your customers with a working—if imperfect—solution.
Key Takeaways
- Valuations are temporary; working products are permanent. Miro's markdown was painful, but a functioning business still commanded a billion-dollar exit.
- Speed to market is a strategic moat. The faster you ship working software, the more customer feedback and switching costs you accumulate before competitors move.
- Infrastructure players will commoditize compute. If your product is just "access to AI," you have no moat. Build proprietary value above the infrastructure layer.
- The market rewards shipped products. Prototypes and pitch decks don't create acquisition offers. Revenue, users, and working integrations do.
The founders who win in this environment aren't the ones with the highest Series A valuations. They're the ones who ship working products quickly, find product-market fit, and build defensible value before the window closes.