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Comment by alecbaldwinlol | Hacker News Reader

Money that comes easily, goes easily.

Where did the VCs get the money from [1][2]? If they didn't break a sweat, they won't hesitate to throw it around without asking questions about profitability.

EDIT: People who are downvoting are trying to hide the truth of the market, whether it's a bubble or not, this is the source of the money and in turn, your livelihood ;)

[1] Probably from banks who got it from the gov't who got it for cheap, right?

[2] http://agilevc.com/blog/2014/10/29/where-do-venture-capital-...

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VC funds getting money from banks? I've not heard of that and your link doesn't support it. Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.

From a 2014 WSJ article [1] : "Spanish banking giant Santander in July announced a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in fintech start-ups globally, and a few months ago HSBC allocated up to $200 million for investment in early-stage tech companies with the aim of improving its technology."

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/04/banks-lure-fintech-st...

These are literally drops in the ocean for banks and VC in general.

Banks invest in VC the same way that auto manufacturers do: to suss out potential innovations and/or to have inside access to future disrupters. They don't do it for the returns.

> Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.

This is a constantly overlooked factor in what's been driving the VC climate for the past few years. "Cheap" money (in the form of low interest rates) pushes more money into riskier positions, and the VCs have to give that money to someone. It's no coincidence that the correction is coming at the same time as interest rates finally rising again.

I get the theory there but it's never seemed realistic to me. What VC would actually change their mind about pulling the trigger on an equity by because of a fractional point change in the risk free rate? It just doesn't make sense.

Are you saying that a change in interest rates doesn't have an effect on funding decisions? Because it seems like fractional interest rate changes would have (at least) a fractional effect on risk perception.

Plus, are you accounting for tax benefits and other ancillary forces?

Not on the kind of long-tail high-risk investments VCs make, no.

It's not the individual VC that changes their mind. The LP that funds the VC has to work harder for returns when money is cheap. They're incentivized to put more money into potentially higher-yielding investments (or even just keep the same asset allocation, but a bigger pool = more money going into VC at the same allocation). That in turn means they're incentivized to fund more marginal VC firms, and then it's the marginal VC firms that fund the marginal startups.

Good VCs usually maintain the same investing standards in good times and bad. But during boom times, there are more VCs, and many of the newcomers aren't particularly good at it.

That's my point: a change from 3 to 3.25% in the prime rate doesn't suddenly make CoolApprfy into a good vs a bad investment. The need to earn higher returns on cash doesn't make CoolApprfy more likely to go big and pay a return; reality doesn't work like that. If you're investing in CoolApprfy to "win back" some income streams, you're doing it for the (very) wrong reasons.

My point is that there's a wide variety of beliefs as to whether CoolApprfy is a good company. To get funded, CoolApprfy only needs to identify one person who believes it is.

When money is cheap, it is much more likely that they will be able to find someone controlling money who believes it is. When money is expensive, the intersection of [people who have money] x [people who believe CoolApprfy is a good company] is much smaller. For companies that are actually good companies, this intersection will likely (although not always; good companies fail to get funded in challenging fundraising climates all the time) still be non-zero. For companies that are bad companies, it's much more likely they will be unable to find anyone who believes they are good companies.

Markets are made up as individuals, but they don't behave like individuals. An effect does not have to be observable on the individual level for it to be observable in the behavior of the market as a whole.

That would still suggest that the set of "VC investments that depend on Fed policy" is the same as the set of "VC investments that will sputter out anyway" (module the fortuitous luck factor).

The article and infographic you link to never mentions banks or the government, and the sources it references for VC funds don't suggest "money that comes easily". (pensions, corporations, endowments, etc - primary or secondary sources that came from working for money)

That's why you're being downvoted. You're attempting to take a controversial position without any logical proof. The "truth of the market" doesn't support your conclusion.

There are some great web sites on how venture capital works, I can recommend https://hbr.org/1998/11/how-venture-capital-works for the basic model (this was pre-dot-com bubble bursting so it got tweaked) and Fred Wilson's summary (http://avc.com/2014/05/vc-fund-economics/) is a good followup.

edit: Wright->Wilson, thanks gist.

> Fred Wright's summary

You mean Fred Wilson.

> People who are downvoting are trying to hide the truth of the market, whether it's a bubble or not, this is the source of the money and in turn, your livelihood ;)

You are getting downvoted because while your point about money coming easily might be correct, your link for where money comes from directly contradicts your point.

VC LPs are overwhelmingly people who (a) have a financial incentive to see good returns and (b) are qualified investors. They include family offices, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

A big part of the latest outsized valuations are actually startups which route around VCs by directly taking investments from so-called "dumb money"—investors who might actually be pretty good at managing a basket of investments, but are not qualified or experienced enough to directly established suitable valuations for startups.

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