Billionaire CEO and investor Marc Benioff says unicorn startups manipulated private markets and he's done investing in them
Its billionaire CEO Marc Benioff loves working with entrepreneurs and often serves as a mentor for a lot of them, too.
But Benioff isn't too thrilled with all the high valuations going on in the private markets, and says he's now done investing in "unicorn" startups, or companies that raise at a valuation of $1 billion or more.
"The unicorn thing, I've been saying for a while now, is not great," Benioff told Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg GO earlier this week. "The reason why it's not great is not necessarily that these companies are not worth this much money or whatever - we don't actually know because they've manipulated the private markets to achieve these valuations."
Benioff says he's been getting calls almost every day about startups raising at these outsized valuations, but there remains a lot of question marks around the actual worth of their businesses.
"I'm not investing any more in companies with a billion dollars or more valuations because I just don't believe in that unicorn theory anymore. I think it's a bad thing," he added.
Instead, Benioff thinks if the unicorn startups truly believe in their valuations, they should go public and get the public market's validation. He used Fitbit, a company he invested in early, as an example for getting the market's stamp of approval by going public.
Benioff is an investor in a number of pre-IPO companies valued at over $1 billion, either personally or through Salesforce's VC arm, Salesforce Ventures, including Dropbox, Evernote, and Docusign.