Week 13 Reading Reflection

Valuation of Entrepreneurial Ventures

1. Personally, I thought that there were a lot of really interesting points throughout the reading that stood out to me. One of the very first topics that stood out to me was in regards to underlying issues that affect acquiring a new business venture. Apparently, sellers who created the business from scratch tend to have an 'emotional bias' towards their business, and they believe that it is worth more money than it should be. I was surprised by this because I feel like sellers should understand that and make sure to avoid that issue every time. It seems like such an obvious bias, so I would have thought that most sellers would think to avoid it ahead of time.
2. Throughout this reading, a few topics were initially difficult for me to comprehend. For example, the concept of 'rollups' becoming a popular trend amongst different industries. The general concept is purchasing multiple small companies within the same market and combine them to form one larger business. This has positive and negative effects, but I thought it was explained in a fairly complicated way.
3. If I were able to ask the author two questions, I would ask him whether he would ever participate in a rollup. I would also ask him whether or not he thinks the concept is beneficial or detrimental overall to the economy. I thought this was a very interesting topic, and I would be interested to learn more about his personal opinion.
4. Overall, I really enjoyed the reading a learned a lot of new concepts that I have never previously been exposed to. There was nothing that I generally disagreed with, and I thought it was definitely one of the more interesting chapters that has been assigned so far.