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The next crisis will start wherever Silicon Valley's money comes from. Honest question: where does it come from? The American consumer?

Clubber 9y ago
Private equity initially, then the public.
pjmorris 9y ago
I'd argue that Silicon Valley's primary paying customer is the VC, and that VC's have had a field day with the easy money pumped out by the Fed and distributed to Wall Street over the last decade. Signs of a crisis may show up in SV, but it'll trace back to a(lack of) VC funding that traces back to Wall Street.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  VC is a middleman broker to LPs in this context, where LPs are endowments, pensions funds, SWFs, and the like.
adventured 9y ago
There are three tiers of money as it pertains to Silicon Valley. - Local wealth derived from IPOs, acquisitions, etc. spanning decades. There is a vast amount of this wealth in SV. - Institutional money that the VC firms put to work. That comes from all over the US and the world. That derives from all sorts of sources, from rich individuals to things like the CalPERS retirement system. - Public listings and local corporations (eg income earned by Facebook or Apple through normal operations, and their ability to utilize their public stock); and external corporate partnerships / investments (that could be anything from Softbank or Alibaba to Walmart, Amazon or a random company in NYC). It's unlikely any of these is a particular source of crisis risk in the near future. In fact, the only surprise right now is that SV isn't seeing far more wildly inflated activity given the Fed policies and the stock / real estate market price levels. To put it into context. The big jump in unicorn valuations mostly happened several years ago. The last three or so years hasn't seen any further dramatic leap in that regard, despite a large gain in the US real estate and stock markets. In other words, SV has been pretty damn boring the last 24-36 months while other areas of economic activity have been hopping.

Clubber 9y ago

Private equity initially, then the public.

pjmorris 9y ago

I'd argue that Silicon Valley's primary paying customer is the VC, and that VC's have had a field day with the easy money pumped out by the Fed and distributed to Wall Street over the last decade. Signs of a crisis may show up in SV, but it'll trace back to a(lack of) VC funding that traces back to Wall Street.

hkmurakami 9y ago
VC is a middleman broker to LPs in this context, where LPs are endowments, pensions funds, SWFs, and the like.

adventured 9y ago

There are three tiers of money as it pertains to Silicon Valley. - Local wealth derived from IPOs, acquisitions, etc. spanning decades. There is a vast amount of this wealth in SV. - Institutional money that the VC firms put to work. That comes from all over the US and the world. That derives from all sorts of sources, from rich individuals to things like the CalPERS retirement system. - Public listings and local corporations (eg income earned by Facebook or Apple through normal operations, and their ability to utilize their public stock); and external corporate partnerships / investments (that could be anything from Softbank or Alibaba to Walmart, Amazon or a random company in NYC). It's unlikely any of these is a particular source of crisis risk in the near future. In fact, the only surprise right now is that SV isn't seeing far more wildly inflated activity given the Fed policies and the stock / real estate market price levels. To put it into context. The big jump in unicorn valuations mostly happened several years ago. The last three or so years hasn't seen any further dramatic leap in that regard, despite a large gain in the US real estate and stock markets. In other words, SV has been pretty damn boring the last 24-36 months while other areas of economic activity have been hopping.