1/ Interesting thing happening in the LIDAR industry right now. 5+ companies will soon or have SPAC'd. Their value is based on *projected* revenue that comes from *entirely overlapping* potential customers, with very little discount applied to future projections. Is this bad?

2/ And how did we end up here? SPACs aren't subject to the same effective restrictions on future revenue projections as traditional IPOs. It's totally possible the numbers will be correct for one of these companies. But it's not possible for all to be correct.

3/ SPACs may be a good thing for pre-revenue companies or companies that have chosen to go public before they meet the more customary milestones for an IPO ($100m in ARR, for example).

4/ If these companies were to be valued based on earnings today, they would be severely undervalued. But if you look at the market caps for each of these companies, they're each being valued as if they had already realized some of their ambitious future projections.

5/ Of course, it's certainly not unusual for startups to be valued based on future revenue projections, even in a highly competitive space. But I typically see private markets put a much larger discount on these future projections than what we see with these SPACs.