Hello and welcome back to our regular morning view of private companies, public markets and the gray areas in between.
All in all, it was a tough week. The corona virus spreads and concern increases as the infections increase. In economic terms, global markets continued to decline yesterday evening (domestic results here) and US indices fell again this morning.
Even in our start-up-focused world in the private market, there's a lot of bad news to read. Yesterday, the impact of COVID-19 on earnings became clearer, and domestic technology companies had been facing an external problem for months. The problems are now. The market slump in the correction area last week did not help.
So far, however, the story has been largely focused on the public market, and with good reason: you can see how the public markets contract in real time. It is far more difficult to recognize the changing dynamics of the private market. However, today we will try to examine some preliminary venture capital data.
I realize that the past few days have been terrible. At the end of this article, I took a quote from an interview with Mark Mader, Smartsheet's CEO, about technical cycles, downturns, and tough times. This may be useful today as the downward trend appears to be continuing.
Let's start with a quick reminder of how high the stock prices are and what that means for tech multiples, and then let's look at the early February VC results from the U.S., China, and Europe. So in Sanskrit: अभिमुखी करोति.
Multiples, markets
Before we look at venture capital data, we would like to remind you that despite the recent declines in technical ratings, we are still in warm water.