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by JakeTheAndroid
737 days ago
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I don't agree it's a myth. Is it an extreme risk? Yes, of course. Do people view the risks to be way too low? Yes. But I worked at Cloudflare pre-IPO, got shares at 1.73, and at one point CF was at 200 a share. That was more or less what I was "promised" from the equity. Stripe is one example of a successful startup not going public, but there are tons of startups that are going public. And there are many startups that wish they could go public, but they simply don't have the finances or business to do so. I don't think VCs changed much from when Google went public until COVID. We were seeing massive overvaluations of tech companies for years. Once through 2020, VCs got scared and now the landscape is a bit different. But the AI craze has started to get VCs back out of their shells taking bets on risky projects. So, yeah, idk what I agree with this assessment. At least it's not been my experience in tech over the last 8+ years. |
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VCs changed a ton over that time. In 2004 VCs were still smarting from the dot-com bust. And VCs were hardly spewing cash during and in the aftermath of the GFC of 2007/08. The days of easy VC money were mainly in the early-mid to late '10s.
And as you point out with your end date of COVID, VCs have now backed off again, as they did around 2000 and 2008 during those bust/bear cycles. I would credit interest rate increases with the current backoff, though, not COVID. During early COVID, funding was still fairly well available, assuming your business wasn't something that required in-person contact; even better if your business facilitated home-office work.
> At least it's not been my experience in tech over the last 8+ years.
That's only ~4 years pre-COVID; either seems like too short a horizon to make this sort of assessment. (Source: been in tech for 20-odd years.)