Despite all the capital that venture firms have managed to raise in the first and second quarters of this year, venture capitalists at an investor panel at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference this morning said that early-stage valuations are softening, reality is “setting in” for unicorn companies that are too richly valued to be acquired and too immature to […]
IPOs
Twilio’s Largest Shareholder Prepares for the Ride
Byron Deeter is likely waking up this morning and wondering what kind of day he’ll have. It was Deeter who led Bessemer Venture Partners into its seed-stage investment in Twilio, a now nine-year-old company that offers services like messaging, voice, image transfers, authentication and video as a software platform, so developers can incorporate them into their […]
Handcuffed to Uber
Plenty of people would give everything to be an early employee at seven-year-old Uber. But Uber employees who’ve been with the ride-share company for at least a few years have discovered a considerable downside to their ride with the transportation juggernaut. They can’t afford to quit. Startup employees have to exercise their options within 90 […]
IPO Pros Expect Window to Open in Q2
Earlier today, Renaissance Capital, the IPO research firm, published a new report about the first quarter of this year, and it didn’t paint a pretty picture. For starters, it noted the U.S. IPO market hit the lowest levels in the first quarter since the financial crisis of late 2008. It noted that not a single deal […]
Biotechs Hit the Ground Running
If we had to gamble on it, we’d bet the IPO market will be far more brisk this year than last year, which was the worst year for tech IPOs in particular since 2009. Even still, it came as a bit of a surprise yesterday when not one or three but six biotech startups revealed […]
Employees Wise Up
This week, a Bay Area founder was taken aback when an engineer being recruited by his startup asked for both its cap table and information regarding the liquidation preferences of its venture backers. The candidate presumably “worked somewhere where he discovered that these things matter,” says the founder, who asked not to be named in […]
An IPO Survey Hints at Trouble
This morning, the law firm Fenwick & West published its most recent report on the state of the IPO market. Its “2014 IPO Survey” doesn’t hold many surprises, but it does underscore an important point: Public market investors have grown more discriminating than they were in the late ’90s — and that’s bad news for […]