@ChrisRodde. Cycles apply to legislation as well… Sarbanes Oxley will be dead in a year and the conference panels will be, “Ohh muh gawd, you can go public to raise $50k with less than $2k in WSGR legal fees”

this is happening for three reasons:

1. the asset class is going negative based on the commonly used 10-year rolling average return calculation

2. there is effectively no exit market via IPOs or M&A…certainly nothing consistent and remotely predictable

3. there remains a significant liquidity crisis in the limited partner world of university endowments and public pension funds

1. Venture capital has been an essential part of technology commercialization for the last 40 years.

2. It’s much more than just funding Internet companies.

3. Many new business ideas can’t do a “freemium” model, and require capital. It’s really only New Media companies that can pursue this.

4. Without VC new industries are going to be slower to develop.

5. Bootstrapping is the order of the day for entrepreneurs, but that should be their viewpoint anyway — equity is expensive.

6. Most VCs are not jerks or lazy and have good skills to bring to company formation.

7. The funding gap this is being created will need to be fixed.

Follow me slowly. VCs aren’t investing chiefly because they cannot meet their own internal funding–so they essentially have no money to invest themselves.

Nothing comes without a price. Your junior high definition of “freeconomics” is laughable. You must still be in community college.

The moral, son, is this: Trustfund sons of their more successful fathers aren’t as brilliant as you once thought they were. The people who agree with me are not people you know.

They are people with money. Money they no longer contribute to sleepy, underperforming, Valley-centric, Protestant, Venture Capital firms.

Unfortunately for you, fewer invites speaking engagements, less time on the slopes.

Aint that right, Ski Sweater.

I have a difficult time believing that “Capital is fleeing the sector… partly because venture capital exits appear to be blocked”. Do you actually think that institutional investors are looking at the IPO market of today when deciding to invest in a VC fund? With the average time to exit of 7 years for most startups, the IPO market of today should have no bearing on such an investment today.

Certainly, with less capital flowing in the financial markets, it will be tougher to raise a fund, thus weeding out the lower performing VC firms. Likely a good thing. Darwin at work.

For businesses that do many money; that have technology and paying customers this isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all; it helps us get rid of competitors who shouldn’t exist.

For some businesses that need expansion capital, or who have great tech that needs a lot of up-front R&D $$, there will always be investors. This is just the market taking its entirely predictable toll on all the dumb decisions VC’s made to invest in the umpteenth social media copycat that failed miserably.

Landlords, staffing / HR, restaurateurs, insurance, the list goes on and on…

I keep thinking more and more that Reid H was right in saying the GOV should give the money to VC’s…