Many companies are now facing a Hobson’s choice between trying to maintain the high-flying valuation they’ve established over the last year — no matter the contortions necessary to do it — or conducting a “down round,” a financing that results in a lower valuation. And industry experts suggest the latter often makes more sense.

Brad Feld, who has been a venture capitalist for more than 25 years, is among those who advocate for embracing the down round in cases where a company needs capital and hasn’t yet grown into a previously established valuation. Feld says that he has participated in financing rounds for startups so married to a particular number that they’ve agreed to anything to maintain it. He has also participated in deals where the company and its board agreed to bite the bullet and readjust the company’s valuation downward.

Based on both experiences, he says his “strong belief” that “just doing a clean resetting — at whatever the valuation so that everybody is aligned and dealing with reality — is much, much better for a company.”

He’s not alone. “As a young investor in the early 2000s, I ended up spending a lot of time restructuring cap tables” after the dot com bust, says Frederic Court, founder of the early-stage firm Felix Capital in London. Court says he learned then that “trying to readjust things or maintain an artificially inflated price through structure is a recipe for disaster.”