Angel Liquidity

IPO's are down all across the market, and I don't think it's just because the market is tough. With all of the regulations (Sarbanes Oxley, etc.) and liability (SEC Investigations) associated with being a public company, there are significant downsides to anyone hoping to run a streamlined, efficient business model - it is especially tough for fast moving technology companies.

We sold a prior company of ours to a public entity and stayed on board for a few years, and the red tape / liability overhead and constant short-term goal focus it forced us into was enough to get us to move on to other projects. Being a public company sucks. I think that's one big driver behind all of these private equity firms with multiple billions of dollars to spend. I hope the trend continues.

Whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the greater VC industry including most especially the unfounded hope that the IPO market will return in the foreseeable future. As I've commented before, the modern VC era was the product of government laws and regulations, from the beginning when the Small Business Investment Act of 1958 put it "over the top" to the final nail in the coffin in 2002 with SarBox.

YC and AVC type companies are great, but I continue to ask, where will the next radically new hardware thing like FPGAs come from (in terms of impact, they had plenty of antecedents)? Heck, the entire post-Fairchild history of Silicon Valley, the silicon part of it, was in this period....