BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
28 Jun 2008

Some of the themes we cover on this blog are the relative over-important feeling VCs attribute to themselves. No one lesser than VC dean Mike Moritz echoes this sentiment, mind you.

This article sheds more light on that:

In the second quarter of this year not a single company backed by venture capitalists has gone public. It is the first time that has happened since 1978, according to a venture capital industry group.

(…)

That may come as little surprise to the well-heeled individuals and institutions that give their money to venture capitalists seeking big returns. Some of these investors have criticized venture capitalists for failing to provide substantial returns on a broad basis since 2000.

Reading the press releases and the vast majority of VC blogs, you would think that indeed, patience is required, because while VCs put on their pants one leg at a time (like you and me), unlike you and me, they are “changing the world”. Bull-f****n-shit. Here’s why and one VC is candid enough to admit it:

But Paul Kedrosky, an investor and the author of Infectious Greed, a venture capital-centric blog, said that there were deeper, more systemic problems for venture capitalists in addition to the cyclical challenges. He said part of the problem was that the industry was backing companies that lack widespread investor appeal, like YouTube clones and dating and social networking sites.

“There is nothing that the industry is producing that investors want,” Mr. Kedrosky said. “The stuff they’re investing in is idiosyncratic — it’s fun and appealing to them but Wall Street doesn’t care.”

“The Valley is operating in its own little world, and the capital markets don’t care about the things that are getting the Valley excited.”

Well said. You mean Twitter and Slide aren’t going to change the world. Man, I must have missed that tweet. The stats don’t look good, either:

Over all, the market for public offerings has been in a funk. So far this year there have been 36 offerings, down from 130 during the same period last year, according to Renaissance Capital, a research firm based in Greenwich, Conn.

“Deal volume has fallen off a cliff,” said Paul Bard, head of research for Renaissance.

The public offerings this year raised $27 billion, but Visa’s offering accounted for $18 billion of that. Mr. Bard said there was likely to be a sharp drop in the amount raised this year from last year’s $60 billion.

Mr. Kedrosky said the problems were particularly acute for venture capitalists — and that leaves them with some answering to do to their own investors.

“Here’s an industry struggling in a big way to hang onto its investors, let alone find new ones,” Mr. Kedrosky said. “They’ve been hanging on by their fingernails.”

The lack of a good way to cash out just makes things worse, he said. “There is no venture industry if there is no I.P.O. market.”

VCs like to live in the comfortable confines of spreadsheets, I sure hope one of them tried to run the numbers and tell me how he or she deserves their own investors’ money when you consider their track record, and the prospects of the broader IPO market.

I’m sorry… If you ask me, I just don’t see a hockey stick trajectory for your kind of business… Pass.

Can’t wait for this entire industry to be disrupted into oblivion, or at least, evolve to actually provide value beyond a check (as in: Want to invest in our company? sure, here’s a desk, get cracking, Sir… don’t just pontificate from the golf course, pal).