风投行业的结构正在发生变化

    不过，资金集中到较大基金手中还有另一个重要影响因素，那就是许多传统风投公司现在都开始设立“机会型基金”或者“成长型基金”。最终数据看起来侧重于大型基金，而实际上其中也包括了投入传统风投公司的资金，这些公司正以更大的力度来更多地捕捉私募基金上市之前的价值。

    在风投行业，很少有人公开讨论这一结构性变化。

    今后的机遇

    拜热衷于社交网络，倾向于刷卡消费，信奉移动优先原则的消费者所赐，许多初创公司正在以更快的速度发展壮大。这些趋势表明，许多初创公司在需要上市前就已经拥有了非常多的资金。如果愿意，许多这样的公司都能实现盈利。但市场看中的是高增长，而非短期盈利能力。只要还有私募资金可用，这些公司就愿意更长久地保持私营身份，而不是急于上市。

    因此，2008-2009年经济衰退以来，公司上市前（pre-IPO）融资规模增长了一倍，融资中位数从4900万美元上升到了2013年的1.01亿美元。风投行业的整体趋势形成了一种新气象。互联网泡沫时期的懒惰致富经历一度让风投行业偏离航行，现如今，风投业已经开始自我矫正。

    风投行业最大的变化源自技术革新自身，风投人士既目睹了这一切，又幸运地从中受益。我曾经在本专栏探讨过这些重大技术变化怎样改变了风头行业，详见《开源及水平计算如何催生了微风投市场》一文。2007年是座分水岭。经过F8开发者大会和该公司在大学校园的大力推广，Facebook成为主流社交网络。Twitter在西南偏南大会（SxSW）上得到科技界广泛认同，并在风投人士佛瑞德•威尔逊牵头下进行了首轮风投融资。iPhone也在当年上市。

    廉价云计算、社交网络以及移动化的种子已经在那时种下。接下来，2008年金融危机引发的风暴卷走了风投行业中大部分陈旧而腐朽的业务，并且开启了一个新阶段。红杉资本于2008年发布的著名报告《安息吧好时光》（RIP Good Times）也许是对这个阶段的最佳写照——现在看来，这篇报告具有一些讽刺意味。初创公司融资的“大爆发”始于2009年3月前后，也就是5年多以前，至今尚未衰退。

    廉价、移动化、社交化、全球化、规模化、全天候在线以及一键购物已经让我们这个时代那些最成功的企业在发展初期就达到了前所未有的规模，同时将大量价值从上市后投资者那里转移到了上市前投资者手中。思科（Cisco）、亚马逊和微软（Microsoft）的IPO市值分别为2亿、4亿和8亿美元，而领英（LinkedIn）、Twitter和Facebook的IPO市值分别达到了43亿、180亿和1040亿美元。因此，DropBox、Airbnb、Pinterest、Maker Studios、Uber、Lyft、SnapChat、Tinder、Waze和KickStarter等公司的迅速崛起，一直都是私募市场投资者的福音。

    But there is another major factor at play in the concentration of capital in larger funds: many traditional VC firms were now setting up “opportunity funds” or “growth funds.” The data ends up looking skewed towards larger funds when it actually involves traditional VC funds now geared up to take capture more of the value in private funds before they went public.

    This is a structural shift in our industry few have talked about publicly.

    The Opportunity Set Ahead

    The trends of faster-growing startups due to social networking, credit card enabling and mobile-first consumers, show many startups becoming very large financially before needing to go public. Many of them could be profitable if they chose to. But markets value high growth over short-term profitability. As long as private-market capital is available, these companies would rather remain private for longer before going public.

    Thus, the amount of money that companies have raised before going public doubled since the Great Recession from $49 million median financing pre-IPO to $101 million in 2013. The overall trends in our industry have breathed a new life into the venture capital industry. From a period of veering off target with the laziness & riches of the dotcom era, our industry has righted itself.

    The biggest changes in our industry have been driven by technical changes themselves to which venture capitalists are observers and fortunate beneficiaries. I highlighted how these tectonic technical shifts have altered the VC industry in this post: How Open-Source & Horizontal Computing Spawned the Micro VC Market. 2007 was the watershed year. Facebook went mainstream after the F8 conference and its big push beyond college campuses. Twitter spread through the tech crowds at SxSW and raised its first venture capital round led by Fred Wilson. The iPhone was released.

    The seeds of cheap cloud computing, social networking & mobile were planted and then the 2008 financial crisis brought a hurricane that swept much of the old, dead brush from the venture capital industry and ushered in a new phase perhaps best punctuated by Sequoia’s famous and now ironic 2008 presentation “RIP Good Times.” The “big boom” in startup financing started around March 2009 — more than 5 years ago — and hasn’t abated.

    Cheap, mobile, social, global, massive, always-on, one-click-purchase has led to the most successful companies of our era hitting unprecedented scale early in their development and has massively shifted the value captured from post-IPO investors to pre-IPO investors. Whereas the market caps of Cisco, Amazon and Microsoft at IPO were $200 million, $400 million and $800 million respectively, the market caps of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook were $4.3 billion, $18 billion and $104 billion. Thus the rapid rise of DropBox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Maker Studios, Uber, Lyft, SnapChat, Tinder, Waze, KickStarter and so many more great standouts that have been a boon to private-market investors.