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Silicon Valley's reality: The party is over

• api 11y ago
  "Life is normal at the early stage," said Ganesan. "But late stage people are very cautious." This is what I've been predicting. Seed and early stage has always been astronomically high risk, and so that's more likely to be priced in. I think we'll see a small pull-back there but nothing too serious, and it might be totally offset by the opening of equity crowdfunding (which I have mixed feelings about but it's a thing). I think this is the end of the "unicorn." The thing that's going to dry up is peoples' appetites for companies that are post-A and still don't have a good revenue picture or have their feet under them at all. By the end of an A runway there should be some sign of liftoff before people are going to be willing to shell out more. There's also going to be a lot less tolerance for drunken money spending unless revenue growth is really good. Investors are going to start looking at bang/buck ratio instead of just bang. It's easy to make a lot of noise and look big when you have $100m+ in the bank. I think the worst of the unicorns are companies that are mostly built to market themselves to investors more than customers and to chase cheap investor money. Those are dead. I personally think the unicorn bust might actually be good for bootstrapped or less lavishly funded companies. It's hard and very demoralizing to have to compete with SV insider companies running on seemingly endless fountains of VC cash. Those companies can just run you over with sheer brute force and lose money doing it and not care.