本月早些时候在纽约的会议上讨论了数字媒体的未来，约翰·莫特被问到我们是否在科技泡沫中间。DOERR是Sand Hill Road，Menlo Park的领先人物，形成硅谷风险投资的米洛公园，自1980年加入传奇公司Kleiner Perkins Caufield＆Byers以来，立即将建议视为一边。当然，我们不在泡沫中，他断言。在支持下，他指出数据：2000年，在DOT-COM泡沫的高度，美国风险投资公司的总投资占1000亿美元。在过去的十年中，他们仍然显着降低，非常一致，徘徊在每年约有20亿美元到30亿美元。据汤森路透社表示，今年今年的VC投资已经超过330亿美元;一旦包括第四季度数字，他们可以高达400亿美元。简而言之，风险投资是一个很好的一年，但2014年筹款仍然在1999年和2000年的水平附近。
Doerr’s answer is the standard VC line on a standard question in technology today. Soaring valuations for private companies, some of them in sectors previously thought bubble-prone — even media start-ups are being valued at over $1 billion these days — have made the bubble question one of this year’s most asked. 2014 has been the year of the monster funding round, led by taxi service Uber, which raised $1.2 billion in June; Cloudera, a big data start-up, and Flipkart, an e-commerce site, also closed rounds greater than $1 billion.
Look at who’s leading those rounds, however, and you’ll see why Doerr’s answer gives an incomplete picture of what’s going on in tech today. For the most part, large mutual funds and hedge funds, not traditional venture capital firms, are controlling fundraising for late-stage, growth-equity companies such as Uber. Today, pre-initial public offering mega-rounds of equity fundraising are more likely to be led by firms such as T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Blackrock and Tiger Global Capital Management than the venerable houses on Sand Hill Road. VC firms still participate in these rounds, but with far smaller balance sheets at their disposal, they can’t possibly compete with the big beasts of the financial universe.
To answer the question of whether we’re in a tech bubble by pointing to data on VC investments is like summarizing the year in U.S.-Russia relations by pointing to Vladimir Putin’s pledge to cooperate on reducing nuclear stockpiles: It’s an accurate detail masking a different reality. Today’s equity funding universe in the U.S. is the richest it’s ever been; at all stages, entrepreneurs have access to a far greater range of funding choices than they enjoyed during the dot-com boom. Angel investors and angel syndicates, accelerators, incubators and a new wave of micro VC firms have expanded capital-raising options for early-stage companies, with crowdfunding platforms set to become an even more significant source of capital由于2012年的职位行为充分效应. Further down the funding chain, mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity firms and corporate-venture arms perform much the same function for maturing companies already in the first throes of success. Some of these types of firms were active during the dot-com bubble; private equity and mutual funds were significant players in late-stage funding rounds at the turn of the century, although some of them, including defunct firms such as Hicks Muse and Forstmann Little, did not find the experience a happy one. But many in this wave of new funders, especially at the angel level, have only emerged in recent years. In 1999 and 2000, venture capital controlled the equity funding universe; pointing to VC investments for those years to get a handle on the size of the bubble was fair because VC investments and overall tech fundraising were largely synonymous. Today that’s not the case.
所有这些都会提示我们重新提出：我们是技术泡沫吗？提供数据驱动的答案令人惊讶的困难。全面监测了传统的VC投资，但“我们跟踪所有股票的全部空间的能力”的所有股票的所有参与者都是有限的，哈佛大学教授Josh Lerner说，哈佛大学教授，他是风险投资的领先权力。由于普通合伙人，有限伙伴结构的投资，有限的合作伙伴结构是主题的监管报告要求，预先跟踪了风险承诺。但是关于新兴资金生态系统的其他部分的投资数据更加困难。如果这是一个泡沫，它仍然可以寻找其主要数据点的泡沫。
Two firms that have had a stab at trying to piece everything together areCrunchBase和CB Insights;这两者都将整体股权融资水平纳入今年，包括传统VC，专用种子基金，天使投资者，企业风险武器和私募股权的投资，该区域在1亿美元的地区。相互和对冲基金股票的补充后，似乎很巧妙的是，私营公司的投资将在DOT-COM繁荣期间的水平上以上或高于上方。
It doesn’t follow from that that we’re necessarily in a bubble; yes, valuations in both private and public markets are high, but on the flipside, the market for technology services has greatly expanded since 1999 as the pool of global Internet users and online connectivity speeds have grown. The bubble debate has raged undimmed into the end of the year; some prominent venture capitalists, such asMarc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz和基准的Bill Gurley，最近成为了论点所谓的“燃烧速率”，一个负现金流量措施，展示通过风险投资咀嚼的初始速度，在今天的许多年轻公司中都过分，危险地高。但谨慎的声音在少数群体 - 并且讨论本身可能是有没有意义的。What’s more interesting than the tired debate of whether we’re in a bubble or not is the fact that it’s traditional VC firms that are making the argument for the negative case most forcefully.. This says more about the state of venture capital than it does about the state of the technology sector.
几个星期前，一个初创企业和其他小型企业的共享办公空间运营商Wework，关闭了3.55亿美元的资金，以50亿美元的升级估值。这一轮由T. Rowe Price，Goldman Sachs和Wellington Management领导。关于Wewore的资助基础的增长 - 超出其纯粹规模的最有趣 - 是传统的VC公司在驾驶它方面发挥了边际作用。WeWork raised a $7 million seed round in 2012, but since then there have been only two funding rounds: a $150 million bridging round earlier this year, in which JPMorgan Chase and Harvard Management led the charge, and this month’s mutual fund- and bulge-bracket bank-led capital raise. For the most part WeWork has bypassed traditional venture capital; its cash stash has been amassed without the help of Sand Hill Road.
The fact that venture capital commitments have remained constant over the last decade perhaps proves less that we’re not in a bubble, and more what the remarkable funding story of WeWork suggests: that venture capital, as a discrete investment vehicle, is becoming less important to private markets by the day. As entrepreneurs seek out new avenues of capital, venture capital may be entering its own type of bubble — a bubble of dwindling relevance, and irreversible decline.