
Angel Liquidity - mgrouchy
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/angel-liquidity.html
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nlavezzo
IPO's are down all across the market, and I don't think it's just because the
market is tough. With all of the regulations (Sarbanes Oxley, etc.) and
liability (SEC Investigations) associated with being a public company, there
are significant downsides to anyone hoping to run a streamlined, efficient
business model - it is especially tough for fast moving technology companies.

We sold a prior company of ours to a public entity and stayed on board for a
few years, and the red tape / liability overhead and constant short-term goal
focus it forced us into was enough to get us to move on to other projects.
Being a public company sucks. I think that's one big driver behind all of
these private equity firms with multiple billions of dollars to spend. I hope
the trend continues.

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hga
Whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the greater VC industry
including most especially the unfounded hope that the IPO market will return
in the _foreseeable_ future. As I've commented before, the modern VC era was
the product of government laws and regulations, from the beginning when the
Small Business Investment Act of 1958 put it "over the top" to the final nail
in the coffin in 2002 with SarBox.

YC and AVC type companies are great, but I continue to ask, where will the
next radically new hardware thing like FPGAs come from (in terms of impact,
they had plenty of antecedents)? Heck, the entire post-Fairchild history of
Silicon Valley, the silicon part of it, was in this period....

~~~
seiji
Is this eff-pee-gee-ay thing of yours a web app? Is it viral? Show me your
virality coefficients along with your 30 day retention engagement numbers --
then we'll talk.

If it's not a web app, you may want to pivot until you have something 18-24
year olds will enthusiastically share with their friends for eighteen seconds
and promptly forget.

~~~
hga
If I'm mistaken and the above is _not_ great satire (or for those who don't
know what I'm talking about): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-
programmable_gate_array>

Come to think of it, they were very viral. I've got one in my DVD player (the
last/best ever made, unit quantities too small to justify an ASIC for one
critical function.)

