
Silicon Valley's reality: The party is over - arcanus
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/09/silicon-valleys-reality-the-party-is-over.html
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"Life is normal at the early stage," said Ganesan. "But late stage people are
very cautious."

This is what I've been predicting. Seed and early stage has always been
astronomically high risk, and so that's more likely to be priced in. I think
we'll see a small pull-back there but nothing too serious, and it might be
totally offset by the opening of equity crowdfunding (which I have mixed
feelings about but it's a thing).

I think this is the end of the "unicorn." The thing that's going to dry up is
peoples' appetites for companies that are post-A and still don't have a good
revenue picture or have their feet under them at all. By the end of an A
runway there should be some sign of liftoff before people are going to be
willing to shell out more. There's also going to be a lot less tolerance for
drunken money spending unless revenue growth is really good.

Investors are going to start looking at bang/buck ratio instead of just bang.
It's easy to make a lot of noise and look big when you have $100m+ in the
bank. I think the worst of the unicorns are companies that are mostly built to
market themselves to _investors_ more than customers and to chase cheap
investor money. Those are dead.

I personally think the unicorn bust might actually be _good_ for bootstrapped
or less lavishly funded companies. It's hard and very demoralizing to have to
compete with SV insider companies running on seemingly endless fountains of VC
cash. Those companies can just run you over with sheer brute force and lose
money doing it and not care.

