Lane Merrifield

speaker

487 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 1 Oct

Lane Merrifield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · The Double-Edged Sword of the "Shark Tank Effect" with Club Penguin Cofounder Lane Merrifield · 1 Oct 2025 podcast

And all of a sudden you're like, I'm not going to make payroll.

And so people come in and go, okay, well, we'll invest in you.

But we thought you'd be worth 500 million because he kept talking about these billion dollars you're going to make.

Now you're only making 50 million or 60 million.

So now we're going to go ahead and it's going to cost you 40% of your company, 50% of your company.

Well, if you've got employee stock options, you've got founder shares, you've got, you know, depending on how well you structured your cap table and whether or not you protected yourself from that.

It's very easy for founders.

I mean, it's so funny sometimes because even I've talked to founders, gone up to them, founders I know, and I didn't know the details of their company, but I see them, you know, they exited for half a billion dollars, you know, $600 million, $300 million.

And you hear these numbers and you're just assuming, oh, these founders are just walking away with gobs of cash.

And the reality is I have a lot of founder friends who had $100 million plus exits and walked away with like $2 million, $3 million, which is still, don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money.

I'm not saying it's not a lot of money, but it's not nearly as much as you think.

And a lot of it is because of all of these rounds and all this process that went into it.

Yeah.

And it happens more than people realize because at the end of the day, and to be fair to the VCs, they're going, hey, we took a risk assuming X. We're now seeing it's going to be Y. We can't give you the same valuation you had before.

And so that's the other thing a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of is accepting too big of a valuation for their company.

You kind of get deluded into thinking, I just had a VC say that my company's worth $50 million.

Then they do the imaginary math.

Well, I still own like 20% of my company.

That means on paper, I'm now a millionaire.

I'm worth this.

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