What this is, and what it is not claiming

Scaling LLC is a documentary web toy about the size of modern companies and the prices attached to them. It is a building to walk through, and nobody at the door will ask you to agree with it.

One ruler, one meaning

The valuation pole measures equity value and nothing else. Revenue gets a throughput gauge. Money raised in an offering gets a tray. National output gets a frame. When the measurement changes, the apparatus visibly changes with it. This is enforced in the code rather than left to editorial discipline: a comparison between two different metrics throws an error instead of rendering a misleading pair of bars.

Every figure carries its date

A market capitalisation is a number that was true on a particular afternoon. Private valuations are the terms of one financing round, not a price anyone can transact at. Both appear here with the date they describe and a note on how they were established. The source register lists all of them.

Historical comparisons

Older figures are shown first as they were reported, then optionally converted to common dollars using annual-average CPI-U. The specimen does not grow when you pull that lever. Only the ruler changes. The index begins in 1913, so anything older, such as U.S. Steel's 1901 formation, stays in the dollars it was reported in: the conservatory does not invent a price level for years nobody measured one.

The game

After the bell there is a growing station, and you are invited to build a company on it. Its valuation model is fictional and deliberately legible: it tells you why every number moved. The ending, in which the glasshouse cracks under the weight of the offering, is a cartoon. It is not a forecast.

What is not being said

That a large valuation is fraud. That a useful product justifies any price. That the companies here are villains, or that they are not. The conservatory has opinions about measurement, not about morality. Where a number is startling, it should be startling because it is accurate.

Artwork

Every specimen, instrument and fitting in the building is an original drawing. No company's trademarked iconography is reproduced. The specimens are recognisable by what they do, which was the more interesting constraint anyway.