Ships in the night

When times are bad, fingerpointing can be a comforting exercise. In today's bear market, we get the sense that there are some hard feelings and frustration directed from institutional investors to the venture community. The latter continue to do well - and the fact that they continue to raise new venture funds indicates they see a rosy future for their returns. Meanwhile, institutional investors have watched their $12 IPOs and $20 or $30 secondaries plummet to $3 or $4 or $5.

While it's easy to accuse the venture community of bumping up valuations so that public market investors can't make a return, we've pointed out in other contexts that nobody holds a gun to investors' heads and forces them to put their money into a stock. If they didn't like the starting prices they shouldn't have gotten in, and if their stocks had a good run, they should have gotten out...