Silicon Valley lore has it that in 1996, when prominent technology venture capitalist E. Floyd Kvamme tried to arrange a meeting with presidential candidate Bob Dole, all he got was 15 minutes in a holding room at the San Jose airport.
To kick off his keynote speech at SES, a marketing conference in New York, Guy Kawasaki asked how many people in the audience were on Twitter at that moment. Hands shot up across the packed ballroom.
“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” he said.
Here’s all you need to know about the current sad state of the venture capital business: For the first time in 30 years, a fiscal quarter ended Monday without a single initial public offering for a venture-backed firm. Not a one. The machinery that, at its best, nurtures innovative businesses into viability (and at its worst blows money on overhyped fads) has ground to a halt.
TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.
Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.
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