Venture Capital at Mid-Life

Mid-life Crisis? Venture Capital Acts its Age from Knowledge at Wharton is a good summary of the issues facing the venture capital industry.

A quick summary is: 

• too many funds
• funds are too big
• too much capital chasing good deals
• good deal valuations too high
• holding periods too long
• too few exits, especially IPOs
• low exit valuations

The net of all this is, of course, low returns.

Nothing really new here - the travails of the VC industry are widely reported.  But this is one of the best short summaries I've seen.

BTW if you don't follow Knowledge at Wharton, you should.  Consistenly good information.

Comments

[Ho]

VC seems more sustainable compared to Hedge Funds though, a safer asset class?

[Ron Stone]

Short and sweet. I actually didn't know there was too much capital chasing good deals. My wife told me about an article on Yahoo (Buzz I think) today or yesterday about the thousands of inventors out there that can't get funding. Maybe a VC specializing in individual inventors would flourish. They could even help them put together a business plan. Just a thought. If we had more inventions in the US, we'd start to grow our manufacturing again, if they don't ship it overseas.