Everyone is testing the waters, |
It's not an absolute lock that you need venture funding to find success on Wall Street, but the road is paved a lot more smoothly. |
Tech is a great place for opportunity, much in the same way that private equity firms looked at manufacturing in the 80s, |
The advantage for them to withdraw is that they don't have to say everything they know and where the bodies are buried. |
The dirty little secret of the VC industry is that, until the Internet phenomenon, they weren't investing in startups. |
The early stage of financing and getting off to a good start ... Ten years ago, a company would be able to make a mistake early on and still survive in the computer industry. That's not the case now. The window of opportunity closes much more quickly in Internet time. Coming out of the gate quickly seems to be the order of the day. |
The Internet was a train, and you either got on it or you got run over, ... VCs were more afraid of being wrong than being right. |
The Internet was a train, and you either got on it or you got run over. VCs were more afraid of being wrong than being right. |
The market has invalidated many of the assumptions on which these companies are valued thus bringing unrealized performance down considerably. While the venture industry shifted focus from consumer-oriented dot.com investing over the last couple of years to more upstream infrastructure technology investing, it will be a while before the effects of the dot.com market volatility to work its way out of venture portfolios. |
These are not passive investors. These companies are actively involved in [Internet startups'] management portfolio. |
While one should never draw definite conclusions from any one quarter's results, the downward trend in short term performance over the last six months will probably continue through the end of 2000 as the effects of public market volatility makes its way through to the private markets, |
While one should never draw definite conclusions from any one quarter's results, the downward trend in short term performance over the last six months will probably continue through the end of 2000 as the effects of public market volatility makes its way through to the private markets. |