Not everything is hunky-dory in the world of stocks. The S&P 500, which has been hovering near its all-time high and hasn’t experienced a decline of 10% in three years, has been the focal point of breathless media coverage. But beneath the surface, the stocks of smaller companies are being put through the meat grinder.
Bloomberg found that 47% of all stocks in the Nasdaq have skidded at least 20% from their 12-month high; 40% of the stocks in the Russell 2000 and, chillingly, 40% of those in the Bloomberg IPO index have made that same trip south. They’re now languishing in their own bear-market purgatory. Investors have been fleeing these companies for months. I wrote about that phenomenon in May, but it has gotten worse since.
Yet, 44 startups that have not yet gone public and have not yet been acquired have valuations of over $1 billion, with five of them in (or nearly in) the $10 billion club. Uber tops the list with a valuation of $18 billion. And Snapchat, one of these $10-billion outfits, doesn’t even have revenues yet.
It’s at this confluence of excess and exuberance on one side and sub-surface carnage on the other that a voice from the venture capital world speaks up: Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark and investor in Uber, Zillow, OpenTable, and others, lamented in an interview with the Wall Street Journal the “excessive amount of risk” piling up in Silicon Valley: “In some ways less silly than ’99 and in other ways more silly than in ’99,” he said.
That comparison to the final outburst of craziness of the dotcom bubble before it blew up is ominous, even for him. But not for the entrepreneurs out there today, of whom perhaps as many as 60% or 70%, he said, “weren’t around in ’99, so they have no muscle memory whatsoever.”
And he pointed at the result of nearly free money sloshing into Silicon Valley, and why all excesses end badly: when startups are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, as they are these days, they’re encouraged to spend it, and so they speed up their “burn rate.”
These “excessive amounts of capital” lead to trouble as startups are getting used to reckless spending.
They do want more money. To justify the additional capital, these companies, which often don’t have revenues and can’t even imagine what it would be like to generate enough cash internally to survive, increase their burn rate. They move into digs with more expensive leases, and hire more people and increase their compensation, and they serve delicious free lunches…. Excessive capital reinforces every mortal sin a business can commit [read… How the Surge of Hot Money Pushes San Francisco to the Brink].
And so Gurley rephrased what bankers have known for eons – that bad loans are made in good times. The way he sees it “bad business behavior is coincidental with the best of times in our field.” Excessive amounts of capital nurtures this bad business behavior and covers it up and distracts from the core of what a business should do. Incentives get distorted and priorities take a turn for the bizarre. Everyone who has been around the scene with open eyes has seen the symptoms. “So, the crazier things get, the worse people execute,” he said.
The excesses are spreading around. Now landlords in San Francisco that are charging “two or three times what the rent was three years ago” are demanding 10-year leases, he said. If they thought rents would continue to go up, they wouldn’t try to lock in the current rates for ten years. They know something the startup world has learned in 2000 and 2001 but has already forgotten. But their strategy won’t work.
When the money flow dries up, “the types of gymnastics” that these companies would have to do “to readjust their spend is massive.” When the prior tech bubble imploded, “half the companies went bankrupt, and they couldn’t pay the lease over the 10-year period.” Many of these companies simply evaporated after they’d blown through their investors’ money. In 2001, tech companies announced nearly 700,000 job cuts. And this time? Excessive amounts of capital thrown around willy-nilly by giddy investors with grandiose hopes at companies with puny if any revenues and endless losses always ends badly.
How much does it cost to manipulate the entire IPO and startup market? Not much. And it’s getting cheaper! It was leaked that VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers would sprinkle $20 million on Snapchat. But the tiny deal would raise Snapchat valuation to $10 billion. Read… Pump and Dump: How to Rig the Entire IPO Market with just $20 Million
Wolf Richter an entrepreneur based in San Francisco with over twenty years of C-level operations experience, including turnarounds and start-ups. Among other degrees, Wolf earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. He airs his often cynical or tongue-in-check economic, financial, and business observations on ...
