Here are my observations of the VC market as a founder who is currently closing a round:

- When in (little) doubt, it's always a no. VCs have to take care of their existing portfolio (bridge rounds) and are only opting in for new deals that look like very safe bets (very strong growth or deep tech defensibility).

- Due dilligence takes much longer

- Valuations are down as expected although it's not that bad at early stages. The most affected are startups that raised pre-seed/seed rounds at 20M valuations and now face challenges raising series A without product-market fit and only minimal revenue.

- More focus on capital efficient business case planning. Current raise should give you 24 months of runway instead of just 12-18.

- Growth projections become more conservative (and IMO more sustainable). Previously, VCs always prioritized strong growth over reaching break-even. That is changing now.

>Growth projections become more conservative (and IMO more sustainable).

What good are any of their growth "projections" if they oscillate between extremes at the whims of the economy?

If two years ago they predicted huge growth, and now those projections have to heavily adjusted down, are these even forecasts? Or are they merely saying "if tomorrow is like yesterday, we'll be fine"?

The time for projecting slower growth was years ago, when everything was going crazy.

Arguably, adjusting growth projections on the basis of current macroeconomic performance is preferable.

Anything else is tantamount to predicting macroeconomic trends... which, if they have a magic ball for, they can use to make a lot more money than in VC.

>adjusting growth projections on the basis of current macroeconomic performance is preferable.

Really? The economy is cyclical. It means you will always be behind the curve; predicting high growth when low growth is around the corner, and vice versa. We can see this in reality; how much garbage did they invest in 2020-2022? You're probably better off never changing strategy, kinda like buying a broad based ETF.

Being adaptable is, probably, equally as valuable for strategy. But that's not really "projecting".

>if they have a magic ball for, they can use to make a lot more money than in VC

Forecasting isn't about having a magic 8 ball, it's about assigning probabilities to potential future outcomes.

In 2021 when people where buying monkey jpegs for millions of dollars and stonks were all the rage, would a reasonable person think the future growth prospects were higher or lower in the short term?

Nothing you are saying is new to the math PhD's who line the offices of finance companies.

But the market still overwhelmingly (but not entirely) prices things on current trends.

Practically infinite wealth awaits you if you can figure out how to implement your cyclical trends into profitable investments.

If you had that attitude in the 2010s, you are no longer in business. You can't anticipate the next cycle. You need to play the game that's in front of you.

the 2-and-20 compensation model for fund managers incentivizes these boom/bust cycles; you need the markups to raise the next bigger fund so you can lock in and grow your 2% yearly fee. When it all crashes down, everyone can say "wasnt just me, nobody could have seen this coming" and the LP has little alternative. The point is not for a projection to be accurate, the point is to say something that various stakeholders believe (and ideally then go work themselves up into a big money orgy, which is where the big exit money is made by skilled players)

See also:

"Mimetic Societies. The leaders of mimetic societies create rituals mimicking some aspects of what they observe having worked in the past. Not because they think it might work, but because their followers think so." https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/1729914687846769061?s=2...

In 2-and-20, isn’t 2% the fee, not 20%?

2% per year! but thx i will edit

Both are fees. 2pc is the mgmt fee. 20 the performance fee.

Just being pedantic :o)

Nobody predicted the fed would raise rates as quickly as they did.

I agree that most people bet that rates would not rise fast.

But it’s a classic case of wishful thinking to not consider that and instead act like the highly unusual period of rock bottom rates was a permanent fixture.

Rates were going to rise, it was always a question of when and how fast.

I think what should be mentioned in the article is bridge rounds. I know various startups that have done it. In my feeling, at least half of the 38% would be explained by VCs raising bridge rounds for their existing portfolio companies.

Rather than come clean that all your valuations came down by 2-3x (the reality of what valuations are circulating on the market nowadays) just do things like raise convertible note with a cap of last round valuation and don't announce it on pitchbook/crunchbase.

It's not easy for VCs to just pause investing or invest in some other stuff than their "thesis" - some have agreements legally binding on what they would invest in and timeframes for spending the capital.

> In my feeling, at least half of the 38% would be explained by VCs raising bridge rounds for their existing portfolio companies.

Heh. That sounds like a sunk cost fallacy on the VCs end.

Either an investment is a good deal or not.

Only the companies in an investor’s portfolio that they truly believe in get a bridge - otherwise it’s a bridge to nowhere.

IMO bridge rounds aren’t driven by the investor’s fear of a markdown - they’re driven by the belief that the founder+team can figure it out and get to the next stage. When risking even more cash on a company that isn’t an obvious winner, you really have to believe in the team.

Not necessarily, a VC needs to show it's doing good business to raise money from investors, hiding your losses helps with that, in the short term.

Early investors are in the same boat as founders: a down round would hurt them just as much.

So a bridge round isn't about "throwing good money after bad", it's about VCs still believing in the business and not wanting to have to sell another part of the company on the cheap.

> don't announce it on pitchbook/crunchbase

Isn't the entire value of pitchbook that they get data that is not "announced"?

What are bridge rounds?

A round of funding in between major rounds of funding, often in the form of more cash from existing investors.

https://learn.angellist.com/articles/bridge-round

A lean market and higher interest rate now isn't a bad thing for the long term. It focuses minds on what is actually a good product, making businesses profitable, etc. etc...

So much yes! Perhaps this shift in capital supply will fund fewer copy cat "X for Y" type businesses (Uber for Y), (Tinder for Y), etc. and focus on truly innovative ventures. I think true innovation in the energy and biotech spaces, to name a few, would still find capital. Like the saying goes, "nothing focuses the mind like half the budget."

"energy and biotech spaces" - it is hard to distinguish between actually innovative and looking like innovative (but smart scam with nice promises).

Why would higher interest rates lead to more innovative (and therefore risky) businesses being created?

Remember when all you had to do was say "blockchain?"

Now it's "AI", but VCs are getting wise to it.

I'm honestly struggling to see a downside. Less "innovation"?

Less chat apps that simply say “YO”

nooo, chat apps are good (developing an open source XMPP server)

Honestly, yes. I had a deep skepticism of a lot of VC-backed moonshots/SPACs in 2021. However, it’s hard to deny that these moonshots were at least aimed in the right direction — way more capital going to EVs, biotech, quantum computing, etc. You get some frauds in the mix (Nikola), but it’s socially utile to have a few of these projects gaining traction instead of highly profitable zombies.

ZIRP also seemed to be shifting investment tides toward green projects and away from oil. The new regime has allowed pollution to continue, and powered tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia.

Fewer VC-funded hyper growth companies means a smaller pool of experienced developers to hire from for other ventures.

Not the end of the world here but worth accounting for some of the silver lining of zero interest rate policy.

You could make the argument that low interest rates are actually very harmful to competitive markets because unprofitable businesses like Amazon and Uber can operate at a loss for years.

More like: After a two-year spike in the number of active investors in US VC it returns to 2020 levels.

I see this in other reporting as well. "Massive drop in X" or similar, when reality is it's returning to pre-Covid levels.

Almost like journalists collectively forgot how the world was before Covid.

> Almost like journalists collectively forgot how the world was before Covid.

Well that tracks, journalists also seem to have collectively forgotten what the world was like during Covid too.

Most journalism today is way too focused on what's right in front of them that can give the most sensationalist headlines. Context doesn't really matter when its all about clicks and engagement.

It is difficult to get a man to remember something when his salary depends upon his not remembering it.

Well, the fact that this stuff still makes it to the front page of hacker news and generates this very discussion right here proves them right. After all, media is not about providing information. It's a business to generate income by grabbing your attention.

This.

I agree. The HN community largely likes to criticize media but fundamentally they don’t understand it.

“The media is a business to generate income by grabbing attention”

This has always been true. Media has been sensationalist since it first started as word of mouth being spread by sailors and politicized as directed by government and business interests.

Once adopted by business interests, it has been forced to reach as many eyeballs as possible in order to be profitable.

Read the histories of journalism, Pulitzer, Hearst, the Spanish American War and other examples.

Freedom of the press is the most important thing and libel /defamation laws are what’s important.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_journalism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

This situation is media is nothing new, but its drastically amplified by digital media platforms. When journalists could spent weeks or months on a major piece and publish it in a newspaper they didn't have constant, immediate feedback. At best they could look at paper sales and industry recognition.

Today journalists see very quickly what lands and what doesn't. They can even A/B test headlines to game attention. The shorter feedback loop can also easily lead to a focus on what one can publish today to get shares and likes, losing much of the integrity that may likely have been on the table when the work stands on its own and you can't immediately watch analytics as soon as its published.

When you guys are comparing a short data driven blog post by Pitchbook about falling VC funding to William Randolph Hearst tabloids starting the Spanish American War with racist hysteria, it seems like the problem isn’t the journalism but that you just are unhappy with the news being conveyed.

I didn't see anyone making that comparison, I'm honestly not quite sure where you were going with that strawman argument.

that's a strawman, no one is saying media was ever perfect, but the death of things like 60 minutes is evidence enough that media has drastically changed.

Especially when it's a blog post by the marketing team of a private company

> I see this in other reporting as well. "Massive drop in X" or similar, when reality is it's returning to pre-Covid levels.

Should it not be reported on, when the rise was reported on? It is a massive, newsworthy, drop and one of the side-effects of Covid wasn't "may increase dealmaking", so it shouldn't be assumed to recede alonside Covid.

One of the side effects of printing $4T+ in new money is an increase in dealmaking.

Most of the new money was poured into the top of the system and it had to go some where, investors threw much of it towards the tech industry as it seemed they could at least keep working and where potentially building businesses that would boom during such a massive a pandemic response.

The recent drop in dealmaking is important and newsworthy. I think the point being made above was simply that reporting seems to ignore the context of how this year's investing compares to 2019 before the massive influx of inflationary cash rolled in.

Feel it's more about how the stories are angled. So often it seems phrased like things during Covid was the norm, rather than things returning to normal.

Thus the interesting question a journalist should research would be: Why did spike during the Covid years happen?

Federal reserve

I think it's less about journalists being sensational and more the nature of business reporting (in the journalistic and financial sense) that everything must be compared quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year

To be fair to the journalist who wrote the linked article, they showed the spike and years previous to covid.

Outrage sells. While some might include pre-covid statistics, the vast majority won't.

Yet this one does.

The article includes a six year chart of total VC funding from 2018 to present that clearly shows the context of the COVID spike.

Negative titles attract more attention, clicks and more money from ads.

Vast majority of VCs also fail.

Don’t forget that the vast majority of VCs either fail or don’t beat the market.

So, back to 2019 levels?

Why though? Now you could get some bargains?

I know a guy (in Europe) who didn't get B-series money because the investor cancelled few days before the notary appointment because of SV Bank troubles in the US

Because the overall financing market is tighter, they are holding back money for their portfolio companies (that may not be able to raise money from new investors), rather than invest in new companies.

That’s weird indeed. Perhaps they weren’t buying because companies were promising but because money was cheap.

Yes. There are many companies and technologies out there which made little sense but had money dumped in it because it was cheap to do so. Cryptocurrency is one example

Even smart money follows the herd.

5.5% risk free gain is a barging compared to most startups.

2.5% of that is lost to federal and state taxes. Inflation is running at 3.1%. So you're losing 0.1%.

The mediocre VC glut is almost worse than - and extremely symbiotic with - the mediocre startup glut. Good riddance to both.

You can say 'good riddance', but this just means when you get laid off, it will be harder to find a job, because the only companies around are the large/established tech companies.

The glut of bad companies has successfully converted the SV startup scene into a market of lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

It doesn't mean that, it does mean there might be less time-wasting, over-funded startups wasting talent though.

And the fault lies with the VCs and the startups they have backed with no path to being a business that generates revenue or even becomes profitable.

Instead, today's startups lives off fundraise to fundraise and when the party stops, they inevitably shutdown.

That is fine, and it’s called risk taking from private capital towards an economy

Which funds jobs in each market and drives innovation.

It’s called having a positive outlook towards an economy, you don’t want that capital to stay in banks owned by top 1% cuz that’s where it’ll stay if you don’t make an environment where they’ll use it to fund more jobs for the masses and gamble it away for a chance at something greater

It’s why having deflation or 0 inflation in an economy is bad, because they want people to invest back and take risks in an economy ?

So why celebrate a pause, unless you want the country to go down into flames. This isnt money where the government will bailout these VCs, this is them taking risks, creating jobs, spurring innovation, knowing fully well they might lose it all.

That's a very nice way to put it, but in reality this turned out to be money not spent wisely and instead distorting the market. This often does not lead to innovation, see e.g. the absolutely zero innovation that we got from the cryptocurrency craze. It could even stifle innovation by distorting the market in weird ways, driving away the money from productive (but less speculative) endeavors.

> It’s why having deflation or 0 inflation in an economy is bad, because they want people to invest back and take risks in an economy ?

You can also tax the shit out of large capital in a non-linear fashion which, unlike inflation, will not hit the small savers.

This will still encourage that capital to not stay in banks, while helping small savers to build capital (which is the only way to really drive out the oligopoly) instead of riding the funding wave and hoping for an exit out of a business built on burning money which will only make the corporate conglomerates even bigger when they acquire you (which is your only incentive as a business-owner, to strive for an exit, since otherwise you'll just be hemorrhaging money from your "business").

Note I don't think this is the way to go, I just think the common narrative (which I saw implicitly in your comment, forgive me if I'm wrong) is just a rose-tinted glance at our current situation in post-capitalism.

You’re right I missed some important stuff, came across this a bit later, a couple of minutes ago:

[Destruction of America’s middle class](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4346450-federal-reserve-and...)

> The crypto currency craze while definitely was a horrible phase, it did end up giving america a lot of advantages, it incurred a ton of demand for american GPU tech which helped it advance faster and have more cash reserves to take risks, this allowed usa to get a headstart to AI which if it uses well, will usher in a new era of innovation for you guys. You might argue that we could just spent 1/20th the amount in gpu market and gotten the same result, but truth is prolly wouldn’t have happened that way.

> You can also tax the shit out of large capital in a non-linear fashion which, unlike inflation, will not hit the small savers.

This will never happen, it’ll cause all of the money to flee out of america overnight, it’s the reason why usa and europe is desperately trying to increase the minimum corporate tax rate globally. In a post globalised world, it’s no longer as simple as just pulling a lever.

> which is the only way to really drive out the oligopoly

The way to drive oligopoly out is by breaking up oligopolies and bringing competition into the market, usa has done this several times, standard oil, AT&T, etc.

You cant shove people’s wallet out into the ocean, and tell them they either spend it or lose it, they’ll panic, they’ll scream for safety, if they cant keep the money in bank, where will they invest ? The most safest and established businesses, ala those oligopolies.

You cant force them to spend and then expect them to start gambling left and right, they’ll instead just want to find safer shores.

The only reliable way to breaking up monopolies is to break up monopolies.

> just a rose-tinted glance at our current situation in post-capitalism.

You’re right, after reading a few more responses i realised i made the comment a bit too hastily and impulsively not seeing through what everything i said actually meant.

But I also don’t think, it’s that “wrong” even the most greedy want to invest in the sane things, if people invested in so many unsustainable businesses, it means there weren’t enough sustainable options to put in that money in the first place.

If USA had not created that 0% interest rate environment, it wouldn’t have been able to take any advantage of the petro dollar benefits.

Initially USA had expected the middle east to invest all their earnings into america, that they got paid with usd for oil, instead most of the money went to asia. That was just the first sign of trouble in usa.

That along with stupid government policies around offshoring so much production to a communist country like China didnt help either.

So yes, i agree with you, it was a bad move, but it wasn’t VCs that created america’s impending ruin, its government policy.

Who do you think writes government policy?

The entire US government is captured by corporate interests and has been for decades. [0]

Voters have effectively no say over who runs for congress or president, as those are controlled by party leaders who are - you guessed it - sponsored by "interest groups." Even at the local level, corporate governors are focused on district chairs (like Anne Wheeler in PW County, VA) to push through all manner of things like rezoning, tax credits etc... for "development."

We're dealing with exactly this right now with Amazon pushing data centers into our farmland and depleting our Aquifer. [1]

[0]https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

[1]https://protectpwc.org/

Politicians write government policies, corruption and a distracted public causes them to write bad policies

People will always try to corrupt a powerful force like government.

You can cry, shoot VC, destroy them, jail them, whatever, there will always be this VC class

Politicians should be held accountable, they got the vote, they got the protection (police, bodyguards, secret service)

If they betray people for money, then that means they write bad policians.

In CCP, there are a ton more corrupt businessmen who’d love to write their gov’s policy in everything. Yet CCP successfully controls them, breaks them up, write pro consumer policy.

And heck they are run by a dictator !

American politicians have no excuse to write bad policies, its those politicians who should be held accountable, VCs will always try to corrupt politicians, if not them, than foreign governments will happily pay up and take that spot.

It’s not an excuse If a corrupt gov makes bad policies

Then that’s it. It. Makes. Bad. Policies.

The US is an "anarcho-capitalist" wasteland of domination that takes great amazing powerful innovations from talented people and uses them to oppress the least powerful underclasses.

Always has always been

I'm unaware of an example where this is not true. Every single major "innovation" came at the cost of some indigenous person's property or is exploiting a worker who is in crisis. In fact when US producers run out of people to exploit in the US, corporations pushed politicians to pass "treaties" such as NAFTA etc... to expand the pool of exploitable labor while ensuring the previous workers cannot compete.

NAFTA is a good thing for usa, it’s one of the major reasons why usa still exports what it can export.

USA spends 6x more money on every american in healthcare, spends more on weapons than next 5 militaries combined, spends way more than any other country on education per child.

No USA isn’t an anarcho capitalist societ, it is just a WILDLY inefficient country hijacked by utopian bullshit people who think money grows on trees, finances bad policies, then facepalm and hide their incompetence, cuz typically people with utopian ideas are terribly bad at reaching that utopia.

This isn’t the 50s or 60s, governments have done a lot to improve the lives of average americans, its just the latest versions of it, are incompetent and the public is to forgiving to them.

Too many politicians who lack drive, intellect and sheer will. When you have presidents and senators older than the average life expectancy of a lot of middle income countries.

This is what happens. Usa isnt some evil doomed country run by anarchists, it’s a country that has saved itself from many threats before, and rediscovered itself many times and pushed through. It needs to fix itself again, NAFTA is not the problem, it’s what’s keeping the americas still “barely” competitive and giving a chance to reshoring manufacturers

"NAFTA is a good thing for usa"

Nope: https://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/

"USA spends 6x more money on every american in healthcare"

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/health/us-health-care-spendin...

It's tough for me to not look at your claims as not malicious given how thoroughly and completely they have been debunked by the record. The fact taht you use spending as some kind of proxy for good says your foundational conception of what society is for is flawed.

So I'm not sure what else there is to say.

You missed this part that i mentioned right after the spending metrics

> it is just a WILDLY inefficient country

It has worse outcomes because it wastes a lot, that’s what I was saying.

> It's tough for me to not look at your claims as not malicious

You are too quick to think, everyone on this planet is out to get you or has “malicious” and “evil” intentions.

> "NAFTA is a good thing for usa" Nope: https://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/

You’re missing the long term idea around NAFTA, it’s to make America competitive again and curb its reliance on other continents like europe or asia.

They want to reshore manufacturing to usa and its neighbours. This is necessary.

The way you just shut it up and say “nope” that it removes short term bargaining power for american workers.

It’s like talking about the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution which brought efficiencies and made those countries more productive.

Back then they argued that it was removing bargaining power of people working at farms, that it was taking away jobs like being a tailor at a sweatshop working your way to death.

Standard of living of americans are much better now, NAFTA long term is planned to be like that, it may fail, but bets are on to make it succeed.

I’d recommend talking to a therapist, all this anarcho capitalism, a random HN commenter being somehow “malicious” and this “evil agenda” to change people’s opinions on HN, idk this is too much drama. Just have a civil conversation, we are humans, not demons or angels.

Evil is when good men stand by and do nothing or worse benefit from broken system

I suggest reading Diogenes

I have a great therapist already though ;)

And megacorps surely haven't taken extreme measures to avoid those taxes, also lobbying the crap out of officials who avoid enforcing them in the first place to not lose cool points in ""the global tech race"". Weirdly the good example here is Russia and China where the state did not refrain from extreme measures to show the market whales their place.

China, maybe. But mafia state Russia??? Come on.

I think you're confusing the last few years for productive innovation. It wasn't. A whole bunch of valuable capital got pissed away because LPs were desperate for any gains they could get. The world is different now, gains have to be earned. Thankfully there's more than enough opportunities rather than over-funded SaaS startups providing services to other over funded SaaS startups. And that's before we even get to crypto.

Hell, I'm not even bitter, good on you all who got the grift! It was absolutely a grift, though.

Isn't that also visible downstream with Chinese companies enroaching into US markets to the point where bans need to be instated to protect stagnating US companies?

Just a decade back it would be unthinkable to have Chinese companies compete on anything besides cheapness against US tech.

That is more due to the Chinese government much more strategically investing in their economy with long term planning, instead of this polarized ping pong game between republicans and democrats

- Also, chinese companies get advantage from their currency not being the global currency, while usd being the global currency allows usa to spur up almost infinite debt and loans without any penalties, or severe inflation, it forces the federal reserves in keeping usd a stable reserve store.

This makes american exports significantly uncompetitive, while china can make its exports cheaper. Not to mention fewer regulations, negligible IP enforcement, obscene strategic IP theft from american companies at the nation state level, have all helped china reach this stage.

This wasn’t caused by VC , but rather American politicians sleeping and fighting amongst themselves when they were awake, while china ate your lunch.

Partially, but China is also struggling and needs to export to offset the shitshow in the property market and slumping demand.

We will be seeing many startups layoff folks, pause hiring and shutdown in 2024, if they aren't able to make any money and keep relying on fundraising from vulture capitalists.

As expected, the cheap money era is dead, and we will be seeing lots of VCs pressuring and demanding sky high valuations of the startups they've backed for their ROI.

That's not really a prediction of 2024 as much as an explanation of what I've already seen in the tech startup world in 2023.

Hiring has slowed for many and paused for some, and the focus already had to shift from how to show growth to how to show revenue.

Not disagreeing with you, but noting there are still a lot of companies that raised so much cheap money they can basically run for 200 years, barring investor pressure. Typically they raised at such high valuations they may never achieve a positive investor outcome, but they also will never run out of money.

Inflation alone would likely burn through any of that cash much faster though, and that's assuming investors didn't mind leaving the money parked there and avoided clawing it back or forcing an exit.

I hope the cheap money era is dead but it seems like the Fed is already planning rate cuts ahead of the election.

Virtually the entire economy is predicated on cheap money. Upending that norm means major changes in lifestyle for most of the population. I don't just mean doing more with less. I mean that a good portion of white collar workers will be diverted into blue collar work if they are lucky: a lot of it characterized by menial pay and bad working conditions.

It is real weird to see the Fed suggesting rate cuts with no recession or core financial stress being immediately apparent. Normally the Fed doesn't really cut rates as some kind of christmas present to the economy.

I have my doubts they'll actually do that and I suspect that Powell was just "jawboning" because they're trying to engineer a soft landing through talk.

The fact that they're even talking about cutting rates now means that the cheap money era is not over and the they're feeling political pressure to cut rates. If we do hit a recession you can bet that they'll slash rates to zero again. They have never once stated any kind of commitment to higher rates and I don't understand how people on the internet read any level of hope into the idea that their viewpoint has changed in any fundamental way.

Headline here was for changed from the site's "38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking in 2023."

What happened to "buy low, sell high"? Isn't it a good time to invest?

It's not clear to me that the title of the post is the logical conclusion from the post's content. The post talks about fewer investors in VC rounds, but the definition of an investor is just anyone who made 2+ investments. I imagine that includes angel investors, family offices, etc? I'm a VC, and ~100% of the seed VCs I know are still making new investments. For Series A and later, it's also ~100%, but at a slower pace. I do know a bunch of angels and family offices that ramped up a few years ago and then paused when the market corrected.

(The thing that made me suspicious here is that the graph shows the number of investors grew from 5,000 to 7,500 a few years ago, but there's no way we got 2,500 new VC funds in a single year in 2021.)

From the included chart it looks like we are back to the pre-pandemic “good times” in total deals, down from the “Must-invest-in-everything crazy times” of the last couple of years. Is this really bad news?

Cash invested today by VC is likely still committed capital from before this slowdown. With corrections in valuations, with high interest rates available in FDIC insured accounts, and the public markets overall performance, I don’t see venture capitalists attracting much new investment anytime soon.

Good!

VC investment will pause for a bit. Then VCs will miss out on the next "Next Big Thing." Then VCs will pile in on copycats. It has always been thus.

Isn’t this normal for an organization seeking 11,000 percent growth with a 20% management fee to stop investing when futures point to uncertainty and new bets don’t necessarily get a follow round raised? VCs can’t afford to get their reputation obliterated by investing in a stage of early growth when they don’t have confidence they’ll be able to take the investment to that kind of exit, so they end up being deeply risk adverse — aka they don’t want to start things they can’t finish - and therefore end up being quite sensitive to economic uncertainty.

No VC investment activity happens between November 20th and January 5th every year! Nothing new.

I passionately hate VC profession and wish this profession would just die. VC backed companies, with rare exceptions, end up being a net negative for the world. After the initial few years of hype, the level of their products, customer service, environmental impact, treatment of workers etc all decline. Failure after failure, the Patagonia-wearing VCs sit there with intelligent frowns or knowledgeable smiles evaluating something they know nothing about most of the time, producing results that are no better than a coin toss.

yet these companies are why software developer salaries are high. If this goes your way, its the engineers who will be affected. the patagonia guys will just move to consulting and make partner etc. Which btw is another bullshit profession which doesn't make anything other than ppts.

Which brings up an age old conundrum: How is market rewarding the pencil pushers and punishing value creators