One of the lessons that the wild Silicon Valley venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught is this: Bigger valuations are not always better.

“I think we’ve all kind of seen the negative impact of having a valuation too high from the last, call it, three years,” Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of Hustle Fund said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. When a VC bull market hits and startups are able to easily raise a lot of money before they have real, provable businesses, they’ve set themselves up for difficult times. READ MORE