> The history of the valley was the history of slow investments. Semiconductors are money hungry and slow--yet VC's invested in them until about 2000.

Not all of them were slow. Intel IPO'ed slightly over 3 years after founding. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Intel

Do you know if the standard 10 year fund life was different back then? If not, I'm curious how that interacted with their relatively slow investments.

Maybe it's just that companies went public at a much earlier stage back then.

>Maybe it's just that companies went public at a much earlier stage back then.

This. My father worked for a few semiconductor startups in the 80's, e.g. Xicor. Liquidity events were trivial compared to now. Small company's with competency and focus could exit with a proprietary tech play which satisfied everyone all around (founders, vested employees, investors, industry). Rinse and repeat for two-three decades and we get the foundations for Information "Tech" startup culture.

It's costlier to be a public company these days in terms of regulatory burden, so fewer companies in general are going public.

SOX in particular is expensive for smaller companies.