Answers
What your company's data is worth.
Deals we do typically land between $100K and $2M paid to the company. What decides where a given record falls is not what most owners expect.
Depth beats volume.
The first instinct is to measure the asset in terabytes. Buyers do not price it that way.
What we are paying for is captured judgment. Ten years of one team working through hard problems in writing is a denser asset than a far larger archive of finished documents, because the finished documents carry conclusions with the reasoning removed.
A company with modest headcount and a long, well kept operating record can price above a much larger business that threw its working history away.
What moves the number up.
Length of continuous operating history, because a record that spans years shows how judgment changed as conditions did.
Visible disagreement and correction, because a record of people being wrong and then getting it right is the part that cannot be manufactured.
A specialized domain, because material from a trade with few written records is scarce in a way that general business correspondence is not.
Clean rights, because provenance that does not have to be litigated is worth paying up for.
What caps it, or kills it.
A short operating history. There is a floor below which the record is too thin to be interesting at any price.
Records the company holds but does not own. Material governed by a client master agreement belongs to the client, and no amount of value changes that.
Personal information woven through the record in a way that cannot be cleanly stripped. Anonymization has to be possible for the record to be usable at all.
Material that is already public. Anything published, scraped, or widely syndicated has been available for free for years.
Why public comparables mislead.
The licensing figures that circulate in the press come from large publishers licensing catalogs, and they describe a different asset in a different market.
An operating business is not selling a catalog. It is licensing a working record, and that is priced against what the material can actually be used for rather than against a headline number from a news archive deal.
The only way to get a real number is to have a buyer look at the record. We do that before we quote.
Questions
Questions about valuation.
What is my company's data worth?
Polyshares deals typically land between $100K and $2M paid to the company. Where a specific record falls in that range depends on the depth of operating history, how much reasoning is visible in it, and whether the company can grant clean rights.
Does more data mean more money?
Not reliably. Volume is a weak signal on its own. A ten year record from one team that shows work being argued through is usually worth more than a far larger archive of finished documents.
What lowers the price?
A short operating history, records that belong to a client rather than the company, heavy personal information that cannot be cleanly stripped, and material already published or widely scraped. Each of these narrows what a buyer can do with the record.
Who decides the number?
The buyer, after looking at the record. Polyshares reviews what is actually there before quoting, because nobody can price material they have not examined. The number we quote is the number the company receives, with no fee taken out of it.
How do I find out what mine is worth without committing to anything?
Five questions on the Polyshares intake are enough for us to say whether we are interested and roughly where a record like yours would price. There is no cost and no obligation.
Inquiries
Speak with a Managing Partner.
Five questions tell us whether there is a market for what your company holds. You will get a straight answer either way.
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