Month: June 2015

Are the Unicorns Deceptive?

The private market is so healthy that even Silicon Valley journalists are publishing the “B” word (“Bubble”, not the one that rhymes with rich).  The robust private market has made the tech IPO an after thought; so much so that we are headed for the lowest issuance since 2009.  The chart below highlights how the Unicorn wave is so strong that 41 private companies raised illiquid private rounds ABOVE where Box priced its initial public offering in a liquid market at a very respectable SaaS multiple of about 7.5x run rate revenue.

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Are we in a bubble?  Journalists are hitting the Wayback Machine and dusting off old S-1s to find Year 2000 metrics we can compare to today’s market to answer the “Bubble / No Bubble” question.  In all the looking backward, they might have missed the reality of today’s market.

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Tech Market Update – Gartner CEO Summit

Include PE Buyers in your M&A Process Curious Incident of the Disappearing IPO

Our friends @Gartner_Inc invited me to speak yesterday at their Annual CEO Summit. I met some interesting people. Two of the speaking Analysts are leading projects around B2B buying processes and behaviors. Gartner has done some interesting analysis here, including creating a framework of Enterprise Buying Personalities. Worth checking out if you are a B2B marketer.

My segment was an update on the Tech Capital Markets generally, and the fundraising environment in particular. The slides from the discussion can be found here.

While reviewing our market data in preparation for the talk a couple of points jumped out at me:

  • The IPO market overall, but particularly in tech, is really off this year. Take a look at the data beginning on Page 12 of the deck. Dan Primack forecasted yesterday in his daily post that we are headed for the lowest number of VC-backed IPOs since the 2009 recession.
  • Public investors like Fidelity may not be crossing over into the private markets in search of outsized returns. They may be doing it as the lack of tech IPOs is offering them fewer alternatives to add new tech names to portfolios.
  • Take a look on Page 22 to see what investors in the latest round for @Snapchat could have bought instead….