Can anyone really say if there is any proof to this rhetoric. Are these companies really in such bad shape?
*edit: spelling
One thing is for sure, you can't look at companies/startups or VC in a vacuum.
You'd be wise to look at financial markets as a whole and all the interdependent factors that __might__ be leading to a situation similar to 2008/9 or worse; another housing bubble, weakness in energy markets, banks exposure to housing and energy, weakness in emerging markets (China, Brazil), tightening monetary policy, sovereign debt crises, geopolitical risk, etc.
If investor and consumer confidence really start to slide, yes, valuations will take a hit.
That's not to say that some unicorns and other companies can't still be wildly successful.
Sometimes a public ally traded institutional investor can shed light on a private companies value based on required public disclosures.
Which is a ridicules reason given that Q3 was by far the highest ever.
With that being said given the state of the public market (going down + low dividends) startups will still look sexy for a long time. I wouldn't worry about it.
This is such a ridiculous comment that it needs to be highlighted for just how myopic it really is.
Angel-and-after VC investment has been driven, increasingly, by the effects of ZIRP. "Fuck it, we don't have anywhere else to put our money, we might as well gamble on 23 red" is basically the prime justification for a lot of money that's been put into, say, companies that deliver lunches in San Francisco.
Now that we are moving away from ZIRP, sinking money into glorified AWS-React-Node applications is going to dry up, naturally. There are huge institutional investors who will no longer be willing to take the risk, period.
The "state of the public market" is getting hammered by oil prices, and by China. I don't know how you read that as "startups will still look sexy". The roulette table looks sexy when the bank isn't giving your savings account any return. The moment it does, guess what happens.
Based on the past two weeks of the stock market? I'm not so sure. A choppy stock market may certainly slow down the Fed's plans for 2016, but Yellen seems hellbent on getting away from ZIRP (and the aforementioned weirdness it creates, like pension funds investing heavily in CRUD apps) before the end of this business cycle. If she doesn't, she's reliant on Congress to prop up the economy whenever it inevitably enters a recession, and given Congress's recent track record I doubt that's a gamble she wants to take.
Look at two things: long delays IPO-ing, and very poor performance of the 2015 cohort of tech IPOs. It's hard to avoid suspecting that companies would IPO if they could, and a large part of the reason they haven't is having to release to the public audited financial reports conforming to GAAP standards.