What a lousy year this has proven to be for the venture capital industry. According to data released today by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, venture funds raised just $1.6 billion in the third quarter. That’s down 82 percent from a year ago and 21 percent from last quarter.
They say “flat is the new up” and that certainly seems to be the case with the venture capital industry. Though we’ve had two consecutive quarters without an IPO and the venture market is all but frozen, VC optimism is beginning to return. The latest Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index shows a small but noteworthy uptick in the VC community’s views of the entrepreneurial environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says that the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks. Google appears to have taken that message to heart because it’s launching a new venture fund at a time when the VC industry is busy practicing its duck-for-cover exercises.
Sad Guys on Trading Floors may soon have some new photographs of dismay to catalog, if the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index is any guide. Released this morning, the index puts VC confidence at its lowest point in the five-year history of the survey.
The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.
Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google, beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.
With Adam Smith’s oft-lauded “invisible hand” giving investors the invisible finger and the world economy reeling from what the International Monetary Fund just labeled the most dangerous shock to the financial markets since the 1930s, the healthy optimism and patient money for which the venture capital world has long been known are fast turning into a querulous hopelessness. To wit, the emergency gathering held at Sequoia Capital this week.
At this midday panel, TechCrunch40 co-host Jason Calacanis moderated a discussion with Jay Adelson (Digg), David Sacks (Geni), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Sumant Mandel (Clearstone), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures), Hank Barry (Howard Rice), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC).
(Quick aside: Before the panel begins, the woman sitting next to me is investigating the contents of [...]
Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is blogging from TechCrunch40 in San Francisco. Technical difficulties at the conference site prevent him from live-blogging, so he is summarizing with the following report on this keynote panel, dubbed “Humble Beginnings,” in which Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz interviews Marc Andreesen (founder Netscape and Opsware, co-founder Ning), David Filo (co-founder Yahoo), and Chad Hurley (co-founder YouTube).
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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