[floppydisk]

The American VC market has been saturated and everyone with a spare dollar has been throwing cash into the market trying to find the next Google/Facebook/Twitter. A lot of institutional money started looking at the VC market as a way to maintain a 7-10% rate of return when traditional investment vehicles started going sideways.

You could get funding for a portable neighborhood pony washing service if you built an iPhone app backed by an AWS service and called it Uber for Pony Washers (or some such)if you looked hard enough.

As the article points out, this is changing. The boom part of the boom-bust equation is starting to flatline with IPOs happening less frequently and for less money and the institutional investors who get in later in the game to buy out the initial VCs being more gun shy about investing.

Net result for the market? Startups need to focus on being a functioning business generating positive cash flow rather than a money pit that occasionally generates a lottery ticket. Not everyone will succeed, but the changing economic climate will push a lot of the fair weather pony washing app founders out and leave the more seriously business minded people which should result in a new wave of solid companies capable of handling more strenuous economic conditions.