OVER the past four years, The Business Times’ Garage team has written about startups raising insane amounts of money to hit billion-dollar “unicorn” valuations. In a playful nod to this, my colleague Claudia Chong and I started our own faux fundraising drive for Garage.

We set up a DIY-ed donation box in between our desks, diligently collecting spare change from colleagues. To date, we’ve raised over S$10, mostly in 20-cent coins.

Can that measly amount grant us a startup-like valuation? Technically yes, with some aggressive financial engineering. If we gave our investors a 0.0001 per cent stake in our hypothetical company, we could declare ourselves worth S$10 million.