
IPO Slowdown Leads NEA to Sell $1B Worth of Startup Stakes - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ipo-slowdown-leads-silicon-valley-venture-giant-nea-to-sell-1-billion-worth-of-startup-stakes-1526317390
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aaavl2821
Interesting contrast to the world of biotech VC where the IPO and M&A
environment has been strong since 2013. More IPOs and big M&A deals than tech
despite only getting 1/5 of funding

Seems this startup bull cycle has been driven by M&A where the late 1990s was
driven by retail investors. However the tech acquirers seemed to have slowed
down since 2010-2014 while biotech acquirers have been doing a steady number
of billion dollar plus buyouts

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sjg007
Biotech is more traditional.. VCs assume less risk overall even though
materials may be more expensive than a straight tech company. In the former
you get something that works and the FDA approves in the latter you are going
for users.. in some sense gaining users depends on vanity like total funding
which drives press etc... This might be a weak hypothesis.. dunno. Other
companies in the space that are not retail consumer oriented with high
valuations seem to suffer.

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adventured
Interestingly China is simultaneously seeing problems in its tech IPO
listings. The private equity market has massively overvalued the companies and
now they can't properly exit by IPO at the formerly anticipated valuations.

"Two-thirds of the 21 tech IPOs in the past year are below their issue price,
with shares down an average of about 20 percent through Friday. Leading the
wipe out are online financing platforms Qudian Inc. and PPDai Group Inc.,
which plummeted 55 percent and 48 percent respectively, while search engine
Sogou Inc. has tanked 27 percent."

"The extraordinary surge in private valuations that has seen China sprout 164
companies worth at least $1 billion now presents a challenge in public
markets."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/strugglin...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/struggling-
chinese-tech-debuts-don-t-bode-well-for-unicorn-ipos)

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timr
Interest rates. The unprecedented, ~10 year sugar high of near-zero (or in
some cases, below zero) interest rates is finally ending, and there's a
massive deflation of non-monetary assets underway, across the global economy.

If you only follow the bay area tech industry, you'd be excused for believing
that this bubble isn't structural -- that it's just the inevitable consequence
of the maturing role of the internet and technology in our daily lives. But
assets _everywhere_ are inflated in value. From Tesla shares to vacation homes
to startup stock to blockchain tulips, the global pool of money has been
desperately chasing speculative returns for years, and that process is finally
beginning to unwind.

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ransom1538
Sure. But. Where do you put the money? Gold? Silver? Or bank accounts? Macys?
Maybe oil is the future?

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45h34jh53k4j
Bitcoin.

~~~
deepnotderp
> Issue caused by centralized monetary policy.

> Suggests decentralized alternative.

> Gets downvoted into oblivion

Look crypto isn't perfect, and it's highly volatile, so maybe putting all your
life savings into bitcoin isn't the best idea, but knee jerk reactions like
this don't help with substantive discussion.

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lkrubner
There have been dozens of substantive debates on Hacker News in recent weeks,
regarding Bitcoin. And the smart people say it’s a scam. And we can’t have
this debate in every single thread. At this point, it seems reasonable to
simply downvote the people who are saying unreasonable things.

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sjg007
bitcoin seems stable at $8k.. why is that?

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mathattack
Interesting - moving from one fund of theirs to another. I'm sure they'll have
to do a lot of careful work on pricing the transfer.

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huac
they actually will have to, because they're going to take outside money to
fund the acquiring entity. they have an obligation to those shareholders to
price the shares properly as well. i assume the partner who is running the
second fund was removed from the first fund in order to resolve that conflict
of interest.

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dopamean
They have to not screw the new investors in the new fund while providing a
fair return for the investors in the old fund. This is seems like there could
be serious concerns about a conflict of interest depending on who the
investors are. I'm curious to know if there's much overlap in the investor
pool.

~~~
mathattack
I'm pretty sure the KPMG's and PWC's of the world make a lot of money sorting
through things like this. :-)

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amasad
Paywalled. Here is a readable link:
[https://outline.com/sbXxJr](https://outline.com/sbXxJr)

~~~
sigsergv
Or this [https://t.co/F4QNmP5YOr](https://t.co/F4QNmP5YOr)

