Farhad Manjoo has a piece in the NY Times discussing something we’ve been talking about ad nauseam here at AVC in the past year or two, namely that venture backed tech companies are waiting much longer to go public and in the process creating a “private IPO” market which in turn is increasingly putting huge valuations on a large number of venture backed companies, including a bunch of USV portfolio companies.
There is an unfortunate quote in Farhad’s post which suggests that the public markets are clueless:
If you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my business
First, the public markets are not “unwashed masses.” They are full of very sophisticated investors who, I suspect, do understand these businesses very well.
It is true that Wall Street will not be tolerant of missed expectations. It is true that Wall Street may focus too much on short term numbers. It is true that you may not be able to control what numbers Wall Street decides to obsess over when it comes to valuing your company.
But I think tech sector is making a huge mistake in thinking that they know their companies and how to value them better than Wall Street. That kind of thinking is arrogance and pride comes before the fall.
