As a follower of Prof. Damodaran, that is one of his best talks.
Here are some key takeaways:
Valuation is a bridge between stories and numbers.
- The words used to describe a business can greatly impact its valuation.
- For young companies, the story defines the valuation.
- For mature companies, the numbers drive the valuation.

"when I valued Uber in June 2014, Uber was still startup that a young company losing a lot of money. My entire valuation was built around my story about Uber being an urban car service company that drove my entire valuation. Bill Gurley venture capitalist one of the leading investor in Uber said: You got the story all wrong. Uber is not a car service company, it's a logistics company. He tripled the size of his business. We could be in delivery and moving, we are going to be everywhere. By using the words logistics, my value for Uber was 6 billion, his value is 53 billion and what separated us was the story."