If you have been reading this blog over the past couple of weeks you might have picked up that I’m a big admirer of Steve Blank and his thinking about how to build startups. Yesterday he wrote a blog post entitled Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPO’s and VC’s) which sets out the changes to the environment in which we are all working and explains how tough life is going to be for the startup ecosystem as a result. As I said I’m a big fan of Blank, but I think he over states his case this time. In the rest of this post I will pick out the salient points from Blank’s piece and then finish by saying why I think the situation isn’t as bad as he makes out.
Blank’s starting point is that the startups and their venture funds used to rely on the IPO markets to provide liquidity and latterly to fund the later stages of growth, but that the IPO market has been moribund for a decade. As you can see from the two charts below the difference between the nineties and noughties is stark.
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Author: TheEquityKicker
