Tag Archives: internet bubble

Venture capital’s new normal

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In many ways, 2010 was an incredibly surprising year for the VC industry. The pace of investment activity picked up considerably following the economic turmoil in 2008 and 2009. The number of companies started, investment valuations and the speed at which financings were completed all increased dramatically relative to the prior two years. At the same time, the long awaited restructuring of the VC industry started to become reality with fewer traditional funds being raised, more small (angel and micro-VC) funds launching and many VCs leaving the industry for other careers. Finally, the M&A market picked up and the IPO market cracked open a bit, creating more liquidity than the past couple of years.

2011’s even faster start has surprised not only many outside of the VC industry, but also many VC professionals. There has been extensive commentary on what is perceived to be an overheated or irrationally exuberant market, but I believe that we are simply experiencing the “new normal”, at least for the next few years. The reality is that there remains too much investment capital in pursuit of funding the handful of companies started each year that will generate outsized returns for limited partners. VC industry returns have been abysmal for the past decade, so missing out on those winners could mean the inability to raise new funds for many firms. At the same time, the cost of starting companies is lower than ever and angels and funds of all sizes are competing to finance the same, increasingly capital efficient businesses. More sources of abundant capital mean more companies being started and increasingly low odds of predicting which companies will emerge as winners. All of this creates a dynamic in which the first inkling of success for a young company yields multi-million dollar financing offers at seemingly inexplicable valuations ($100 million has become the new $10 million) and proven success generates multi-hundred million dollars financings at unprecedented valuations.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be the difficult reality of the VC industry for at least the next few years. For now, this new normal seems to be limited to the private investing market, not the public market, suggesting that this is not a bubble like the one experienced a decade ago. Further, in the VC market, dollars invested today don’t prove themselves to be ill spent for several years down the road. The repercussions of poor investing take even longer to unfold. The new normal in the private market will not quickly disappear with the bursting of a bubble, but rather slowly give way like an aging balloon bleeding air.

While many VCs will lose playing this new game, the good news is that there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, or in all likelihood, a consumer. Capital is freely and cheaply available to those willing to accept the startup challenge, both here in the US and around the globe. The startups that do emerge from the current financing frenzy as market leaders will have created innovative products and services for which consumers will be the ultimate beneficiaries. Those entrepreneurs will have created enormous wealth for themselves. The VCs that supported those entrepreneurs may or may not have generated returns for their investors. Which would you bet on?

Miners vs. picks and shovels: a contrarian venture capital investing approach?

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Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article about the “fuzzy math” driving the funding of companies in Silicon Valley. In talking to my peers in the investment community, there seems to be consensus that valuations are regularly disconnected from the reality of many companies. That said, the exuberance seems to be continuing and is at its peak amongst consumer-facing media companies.

 

At Battery, our digital media investing is focused on two categories of companies, of which the first is consumer-facing media properties that build, aggregate and monetize audiences in differentiated ways. The second category is companies that provide the tools and technologies to support the first category, including everything from ad networks to targeting and optimization software to video delivery infrastructure. Increasingly, we find ourselves spending more time on the second category while largely avoiding the first. Broadly speaking, this seems to be a fairly contrarian investing approach.

 

There is no shortage of speculative, high-priced investments being made in hopes of finding the next YouTube or MySpace or Photobucket. My perspective is that the risk/reward tradeoff associated with investing in many of these companies does not compute. I’d much rather invest in the companies that are arming all of the competitors in the consumer media market (the picks and shovels approach) than bet on identifying the one that is going to be the next big hit (trying to find the goldmine). There is no doubt that incredible amounts of equity value can be created by leading consumer media companies, as evidenced by the aforementioned companies. However, neither I nor any investors I have spoken to have found a crystal ball that tells us which consumer web properties are going to be the next ones to resonate with consumers and spread virally. In addition, there is intense competition for consumer attention on the web, making it an expensive battle to fight. Lastly, it seems that the equity value that has been created by consumer web properties in recent memory has been independent of demonstrated economic success.

 

As we learned in earlier this decade, valuing companies primarily on audience-based metrics is not a sustainable approach. At the same time, we have also seen that companies that build fundamentally sound businesses by providing value to and extracting value from paying customers can also create tremendous amounts of equity value. As an investor and an entrepreneur, do you have a better shot at creating the single winner in the online video destination market (i.e., Youtube) or building one of several successful companies in the online ad serving market (i.e., DoubleClick, Aquantive, 24/7 Real Media, Right Media)? Which businesses are easier to predict and monetize?

 

I think that chasing the next Youtube also puts investors at odds with their entrepreneurs. Searching for a single big win forces investors to take an aggressive approach to managing their portfolio of “bets”. Approaches to financing and exits can diverge dramatically when an investor is swinging for the fences at the potential expense of the entrepreneur. While the economic rewards of investing in picks and shovels may not be as great (although this can be argued), the satisfaction of building a sustainable business in partnership with entrepreneurs is well worth the cost associated with watching this current “gold rush” from the sidelines.