This is pretty interesting to me. I wonder if the press is just blowing things out of proportion, or if there's some Big Money™ behind this so that investors can convince companies to agree to worse terms.
Whether that changes depends on a bunch of factors. The two biggest are the overall health of the economy and how economically incestuous high-tech has become. If write-downs and possibly failures among the unicorns trickles down a lot to smaller ventures and investors, it will get worse. Otherwise it will be mostly isolated to that segment of the market.
Edit: check the other response to the parent-- looks like we might indeed be seeing a pullback in angel/seed.
For context: - It's less than ten percent of Google's market cap ($490 billion) [0] - The average Series D or later round is 40x higher ($100 million) [1] - It's less than a tenth of a percent of the US bond market ($40 trillion.) [2]
Net - seed funding is just not a lot of money compared to the market at large. If founders and VCs have money, they can spend it. It gets very different later on.
[0] http://www.google.com/finance?cid=304466804484872 [1] https://www.preqin.com/docs/press/Venture-Capital-Q1-15.pdf [2] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/14/technology/cb-insights-ventu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_market
I don't think the sky is falling, but people are tightening up on the number of deals being done, there's no doubt about that.