Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble | Hacker News Reader

Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble

gigaom.com

This post sent a chill of reality down my spine. We are a cleantech startup currently in the process of raising our seed round. This tells me that the window may be closing fast.

<rant/>Let me tell you after years of work to get to a truly fundable opportunity there is nothing more painful than watching it all slip away because the banks don't trust each other's balance sheets. I realize that there are bigger problems in the world right now than ours, just look at Iceland, but still this makes me want to go out and strangle a banker. </rant>

Your rant fails XML validation. I totally agree with it, though.

"strangle a banker"?

Do you mean to strangle: a speculative investment banker, old time JP Morgan and pals who created the CDS and all that to buy companies cheap later (they've been doing that for over a century, ask Graham Bell), the irresponsible borrowers in US and UK (going bankrupt has a social cost, now a worldwide cost), the war profiteers (you know who), consumerism (non-durable goods are now only pollution), all the excess size strategy (from hummers to expensive corporate software), and finally, with honorable mention, the Sarbanes-Oxley dodging Hedge Funds.

How is it that a country with close to a third of the world GDP could get so bad? How did you let that happen?

> Sarbanes-Oxley dodging Hedge Funds

Hedge funds aren't in trouble because US regulators couldn't make them buy dumb loan packages and the like. That's why the hedge funds have money to buy the good assets that are now on sale.

However, I don't know why foreign buyers bought those things, so I'll just note that they often tell the US how much smarter they are....

Most hedge funds are collapsing.

The leverage trick is dead end since last year, and it brings debt.

(transcript from Financial Times) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1988234/posts

"Their performance is shocking" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d679aefe-8f93-11dd-9890-0000779fd18c...

For fun http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&nolr=1...(bust|redemption|crash|leverage|short+selling)&btnG=Search

Oh and the more ruthless ones, the ones short selling and even naked short selling on the stock market are only postponing the inevitable. Gordon Gekko would be proud.

Cleantech is a luxury good, pursued by people and their politicians when they feel wealthy. I don't envy your situation at the moment.

Only a luxury good if you are allowed to freeride on society by dumping your dirt on it for free as an alternative to using clean technology.

Indeed it's a luxury only because we've socialized the cost of the externality.

Completely untrue when you look at technologies that can SAVE someone money. It makes sense given increase demand for fossil fuels, to provide a cheaper alternative.

To be fair, I think you're referring to companies that are luxury goods, e.g. carbon offsets, and those could be argued are luxury goods (or rather goods for someone's conscience).

Not all of it. Heating and gasoline prices are expensive. Energy in general is expensive. If it's possible to create a system cheaper than burning stuff we're in good shape.

It makes me want to start a bank.

The average Sequoia startup raises a lot of money, so it makes sense for them to sound all kinds of alarms, if you started out being frugal and efficient you're already trying to survive. If you're a mega startup with Aerons, yeah okay.

Don't pick on Aerons. My back has been thanking me every day since I acquired an Aeron from the Arthur Anderson bankruptcy auction many years ago. Given how long these things last, and how little they cost relative to the cost of employee retention, even new, I think it's a no-brainer. Good chairs are mandatory.

This is very true. I bought a cheap office chair from a box retailer a year ago and completely regret it. Sitting and trying to do work becomes work in of it self. In fact, it is painful. A chair is one of those programmer's tools that you should spend a little money on (keyboards being another example).

Yeah, I lived through several Office Max/Office Depot/Walmart chairs. They're kinda like inkjet printers...they wear out so fast, and work so poorly, that when you finally break down and buy a laser printer (or good quality chair), you look back and think, "What kind of idiot must I be to keep going back and buying the same crappy thing over and over and expecting it to be any different?" Sure, I'd buy different brands and models every time, just like with chairs, but in the end the level of quality at that end of the market for those particular goods just isn't worth buying at any price. I've now had the same chair and the same color laser printer for many years, and several times the lifespan of a cheap office chair or an inkjet printer. Both have provided fantastic value, and are still working great, and I expect to get another several years out of both of them. I just wish I'd learned that lesson a little earlier in life.

And, I agree on keyboards, though the longevity of even good keyboards is not quite comparable. But, when I found a keyboard I liked a few years ago (an IBM small form-factor keyboard, where escape, function row and the number pad are all closer to home), I bought two of them--I'm still using the first, and the second is ready to step in at the first signs of breakage in the first.

I meant more like Maltron ergonomic keyboards: http://www.maltron.com/

I don't buy into none of them fruity keyboards. I might start considering options like that, if I experienced any pains in my hands, wrists, or arms. But, once I switched to a good chair, I've never had any keyboard related pains (while I'd experienced tons of problems before that, and experimented with split keyboard layouts to no avail...one thing that did help, was switching to a tiled window manager and almost completely killing the mouse from my workflow). I guess everybody is different, but I'm perfectly content with a good quality traditional keyboard (though a shorter reach to escape is a nice feature).

I've never tried any of them either but have met some devout followers: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo/kinesis.html

I use one of these: http://keyovation.com/ at work. It's substantially cheeper than the Maltron, but missing a few bits, such as a separate numeric keypad, and I'd really like to get control, alt and shift keys in the gap between the two halves.

Well, I missed out on Aerons the first time through. Maybe I'll find some cheap ones in half a year or so. :p

There is a whole economy surrounding Aerons. You can buy them used, at any time, for about $750-$800. That's not the bargain that they were during the dotcom bust (I bought mine for $365 plus auctioneers fees), but it's $350-$500 off of new retail, and well worth it. Steelcase leap chairs aint half bad either, and can be had slightly cheaper, though there seem to be a lot less of them on the market. Interestingly, I also bought a Keilhauer chair at the same auction where I bought the Aeron--it was $35 plus auctioneers fees, and it's a $900 chair new (and a very fine chair in its own right)...quality chairs that aren't Aerons are also available. I definitely don't suggest sitting in a crappy chair while you wait around to save $200 or $300. I wouldn't, anyway, and when we start hiring, we certainly won't make people sit in crappy chairs.

I'll have to try one of those someday.

I've been sitting on what looks like a cheap Aeron knockoff (~CAD$250 - http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=88,91,9...) for about 5 years now, and I'm very satisfied with it - especially compared to other chairs I've tried. I'm really curious if the Aeron is actually worth a 5x price tag compared to a chair I'm already happy with.

Enter Canadian Postal Code

Can I get a link to that I can use in the US?

Edit: Or a Canadian Postal Code...

Argh. I don't know why e-commerce sites insist on doing that.

Here's the postal code for one of their own stores: M1H1A9.

I've tried finding a non-annoying link, but Google results for that chair's name show a slightly different picture (maybe a newer model).

A new IKEA Markus chair for $200 (less in Europe) is more than fit for this. I'm sure there are other similar ones. Maybe not fancy looking but its mesh and back support are the best I've used (including Aerons.) Spending over 200 for a chair is perception only, IMHO. Or being pretentious.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00103102

I'd be willing to try an IKEA chair. When we start hiring full-time people, I'll give my Aeron to the first hire, and sit in a Markus myself to see if it's up to snuff--if it is, that's wonderful. I'd love to save $600 per chair over used Aerons.

But, frankly, I'm suspicious. IKEA furniture is not exactly known for quality or longevity (though its quality is often equal to furniture costing several times more...a lot of furniture, even expensive furniture, is just made really horribly these days--I was astounded to note that relatively expensive places like Ethan Allen and Restoration Hardware are now selling MDF garbage just like Walmart and Target...people are often dumb enough to buy based on brand without any knowledge of what they're buying).

How long have you been sitting in this chair? I've got six or seven years of ass time in my Aeron, and it sits exactly the same as when I bought it (the foam lumbar support dingus did just give up the ghost a few weeks ago, so it's slightly the worse for wear--but, just like parts in a high quality electronic device, it's a replaceable component, and I always wanted the upgraded adjustable Y-shaped lumbar thing, anyway, so it's a mixed blessing...and, many people remove that part and sit in the chair with no additional lumbar support, anyway, so the chair is still perfectly functional and comfortable).

I had one at the place I worked in '97-'98, and frankly I didn't find it all that comfortable.

Same here. I've had one...yes it's a good chair, but I don't understand the price difference between my chair and the aeron.

Our chairs were 30 dollars each and we got them used, Saved 10s of thousands.

I use an Aeron at home... While I do think they're overpriced in comparative terms, they are better than a standard $100 chair.

That being said, I don't use an Aeron at the office, and I don't find myself pining for my chair at home all day long.

Sitting for very long periods becomes uncomfortable because you're not supposed to sit for long periods. The human body just isn't built for it. Get up and walk around the block. Buying a chair that encourages you to stay seated is the wrong solution.

Ok, but if your body wasn't built to do something and you're still going to do it anyway, you might as well use any resources you can afford to ease your pain.

The recent IPO drought has been very disturbing. But does anyone know if the reason companies have not been IPOing? Is it a lack of cash flow and profits? Are the newest round of tech startups not making money? Or are the companies as good as ever, but investor interest has disappeared? If the profits are there, tech companies could just start paying dividends, and the investors will come. I'd buy stock in a tech company that paid a 4% dividend yield that grew each year. But buying stock in a non-dividend paying tech company is a game for speculators. The market for speculation is down, and I don't expect to see it come back any time soon.

I really like the way you think. It's true that the stock market has become one big ponzi scheme over the past few decades. Dividends seem to have gone out of style, leaving capital appreciation by selling to a 'greater fool' as the only way to profit. I suspect that this train of thinking will change, but not right away. Give us 2-3 years of nuclear winter in the markets and things may change. Hey anything is possible, even MSFT now pays a dividend.

Even MSFT pays only 1.3% p/a. Even in that case, it's a gesture.

What if startups directly paid investors. Gave them back their money + some or paid dividends or something like that. Theoretically, that should be just a different way of doing approximately the same thing.

MSFT also does stock buyback which works like a dividend but with better tax implications.

Aren't those 'one -offs?'

No, they are ongoing. There is a lot of administrative overhead to dividends so you only want to do it 1 to 4 times a year. But, buybacks are best spread out over time so they don't cause the price to spike. MSFT decided on a 50 / 50 split with a massive dutch auction for 8.1% of the stock and then the other 20 billion as an ongoing buyback until 2011. Which they finished so they are now doing a 40 billion buyback until 2013. (This will probably also finish early.)

What's odd about buyback's is in theory they should have little effect on today's stock price, but because they concentrate value in decreasing number of shares they simulate exponential growth when the company is just milking a cash cow. Which should over time drive up the stock price and force a split.

"does anyone know if the reason companies have not been IPOing?"

SOX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act

I get special pleasure from answering big questions with short answers :)

I'm talking about the drought in 2008 ( as compared to 2007 )

> I'm talking about the drought in 2008 ( as compared to 2007 )

SOX raised the cost but it takes time for folks to develop alternatives. Some companies could afford SOX in 07 or (more likely) couldn't afford to change strategy. The 08 candidates had an extra year to find an alternative to paying the SOX cost plus they were less able to afford it.

most recent startups aren't building revenues, they compete for eyeballs. friendfeed, twitter, youtube, slide... there's hardly a case for an IPO

But does anyone know if the reason companies have not been IPOing?

because IPOs are risky, and people are avoiding risk

Curious to hear what the investors, PG, and others think on HN- it's not as if VCs stopped deals that they had already signed off on. Are their LPs revolting?

If that's the case, then it means there is less cash to go around. If you're still a bad-ass startup, it still seems that your valuation would still be relatively the same at such an early stage, right?

Good question.

I wonder if we'll see a shift from what pg advocates, to what DHH advocates?

Small steady profits vs. high growth and buyout.

The main costs of say a YC startup are living costs - in a downturn, these should drop. Raising second round funding will be more difficult, sure. But in times of trouble, people cut back on bars and stay in, and will spend even more leisure time online. I see the ecommerce space surviving this very nicely; ads will take a big hit; and god be praised there will be less unjustifiable multi-millino M and A's of small start-ups that have not even reached revenue stage - start up entrepreneurs will be forced to actually build a business!

Instead of big exits over a long period of time with big funding rounds you have shorter exits for less money with less and smaller funding rounds. I think this has already been happening.

It is nice to have big well funded unprofitable ventures out there to employ people (like ning.com) but with fewer of those around the corner the job market is probably not going to look too good.

you think the small investment- small exit complex is more stable or more recession proof?

Yes it is a lot like KB Homes trying to stay in business by building smaller houses. They are having success with that while the bigger houses just are not selling or are selling at a loss. There have been a lot of "small" exits (small as in tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions). I believe it is better to have an exit, regain all of the money you spent + take away a couple of extra million then going for broke.

Better? Sure. But I'm not sure if your example holds. I don't know the situation, but I'll guess that building smaller homes is producing a type of product that is more recession proof. Similar to producing household or business basics, or (even better) cheaper substitutes.

I'm not sure you have an equivalence here. The small startup/small exit "industry" can be thought of as producing small businesses for purchase. Therefore, it is subject to the market for small businesses. I agree that the demand in this market is somewhat independent of the demand in mega-acquisition or IPO markets, but I think it's a big statement to say it is more recession proof.

I welcome any changes that make bandwagon VC less profitable and dominant. This will encourage other forms and structures of funding more friendly to people who are actually building businesses.

That's what's funny - most VCs aren't profitable - at least not to their investors. They make their money administrating. That's why the best VC firms, and hedge funds for that matter, waive or reduce their admin fee (normally ~2%).

You realize, I hope, that Sequoia cannot be accused of either being a "bandwagon VC" or not being profitable.

Sequoia is, by most measures one of the best, if not the best, VCs in the world, in terms of success and respect from peers and the companies they fund.

So, pick on the VC model all you like...but this is an article about something Sequoia has said that effects pretty much all of us. If Sequoia-backed companies are being told to tighten their belts, then we'd all be smart to do the same. Sequoia hasn't gotten to where they are by investing in companies that waste money...so the assumption that they're saying, "Stop wasting money, as you've been doing lately." probably isn't the right way to take this advice. It should probably be taken as, "I know you all run a tight ship, and you're doing the best you can to maximize returns without being wasteful, but now might be the time to focus on outlasting your competitors, rather than outgrowing them."

The companies that survive will be the ones that will be best placed to become market leaders when the market begins to recover. That's the points I'm taking away from this, anyway. I guess I could be wrong.

Definitely. I've met them and I'm well aware who they are and what they've done.

I was _not_ talking about Sequoia or any of the VCs listed here: http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html (I know for a fact Greylock doesn't take a management fee). That list is roughly the smart money even if it is somewhat dated. On the hedge fund front, Clarium has reduced management fees and higher performance payouts. Those types of VCs and hedge funds are few and far between, however. I was talking about the industry in general.

Love the outlast instead of outgrow quote. I think your last paragraph is dead on.

i can see articles like this, and other chicken little articles and notices applying to big-funding startups, but what i haven't seen is how this applies to the little guys. me and my partners launched very recently (and were reviewed here, flowmingle.com for the curious), and we are currently unfunded. we're in the very very early stages of seeking funding, but on the scale of bubble money we're not looking for much -- just enough to move the servers to EngineYard and get a few ad campaigns out in a few major markets to start building a user base.

so in our case, i have a day job, and that job helps support the crew, both of which live very lean. i have the highest expense set (and the most experience, and can generate the highest salary) so i'm the one who works.

what does this mean for the little guys? is there still money out there for people who don't need a dump truck full, but still have a phenomenal idea?

these are the questions i'm looking to have answered. someone want to write that article?

(xp)

well if all you want is hosting fees and money for ramen, you don't need funding at all. just use your VISA.

This is great news for those who opted for the slower route of developing services/solutions without external funding. It has the effect of reducing competition within the marketplace. It will also divert developers to projects with better business models.

Call me a marxist, but the first thought that came to mind when I read this, is "Are the LPs (correction: GPs) at Sequoia going to get frugal?" Is Mike Moritz going to reduce his (most likely seven digit) salary?

I don't see what that has to do with the companies his firm funds, marxist.

Mike Moritz is a general partner but not an LP I think... an LP is the institutional or individual investors who put money in the fund.

Oops. You're correct. Sorry. I edited it but in a way that still makes your comment relevant.

Since the general partner has full liability for all financial obligations, I imagine the general partner would be another limited liability type firm and Moritz would be an executive hired by the general partner entity.

Aren't these guys paid as a percentage of profits and funds managed? In that case, presumably, there will be fewer startups when there is less funding implying fewer gains which implies a lower salary for him.

If you need your investors to tell you to buckle up and cut costs because hard times are ahead, you're probably not the most suitable person to run a company and you might want to consider getting out asap...

I'd be worried if YC canceled their program. Otherwise, I'll abide.

Entrepreneurship for people who can think and act "out of the box". And society should appreciate these risks.

yeah like starting a website is real "out of the box" thinking in the bay area

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

No one knows what is going to happen. Not Mike Moritz, not John Doer, not Guy Kawasaki. It doesn't surprise me that Sequoia is telling its startups to be frugal, but they should be doing that anyway. Startups that run in anything but Frugal Mode are begging for failure.

Until society entirely breaks down -- government has dissolved, people running wild in the streets, tent cities springing up by the thousands, people fighting over who gets the last mudcakes -- business will continue. Unemployment could reach as high as 10 percent, but business needs will still exist, as will the need for innovation that saves money and increases efficiency.

Outright panic caused by petulant bankers is not only annoying, it's downright stupid.

Well we have the tent cities.... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26776283/

Well, all that proves is that some bastard has been handing out tents to the homeless.

a startup opportunity in and of itself ;~)

That's why I qualified it with "by the thousands". They're not cropping up by the thousands.

Yep, 2 years ago all the exact same people were talking Web 2.0! Change the World! Everyone can be the next YouTube! You'd be a moron to stay in your secure job when you could be a billionaire!

They're no more believable now than they were then.

even without the downturn, a reality check was coming. literally hundreds of little websites have been surviving due to only one factor: costs have dropped so low for producing a website that you can run it on poverty wages for years. in the 90s this wasn't the case...higher burn rates put more companies under quickly.

and the web economy is maturing in ways that just aren't friendly to small sites. google has become an accretion disc for all ad revenue that even other big websites can't compete with. the major sites are paying good wages to good talent...increasingly engineers will take $120k for 9-5 from yahoo over a lottery ticket and slave labor from a startup

the recession will just wake most "founder" types up to the reality that their payday will never emerge

I've seen no discussion on targeting international customers. In the intermediate term this is a global recession. But I believe it will be longer and worse in the US than in many other places. It would be prudent to consider reducing exposure to the US in your plan.

> But I believe [the recession] will be longer and worse in the US than in many other places.

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com