Venture capitalist and Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, advised people against “cramming” too much money into startups, such as Uber, Snapchat, and WeWork, at last week’s Goldman Sachs technology conference. Following his speech, Gurley gave even further insight to investing in startups and how the slang word, FOMO, plays into investing.

After speaking about the risks of “cramming” too much money in startups at the Goldman Sachs technology conference last week, venture capitalist Bill Gurley exited the stage.

More than a dozen investors swarmed the lanky partner of Benchmark, eager to speak with him— but few were planning to heed the venture capitalist’s advice. According to Gurley, one man, who represented a large mutual fund, asked, “You don’t want us to invest in this but the big tech stocks are not delivering enough growth and my competitors are getting into these startups, so what are we supposed to do?”

Gurley says he didn’t have a good answer but he wasn’t surprised by the sentiment, which he describes as FOMO, a slang popular among millennials that stands for “fear of missing out.”

It is this infectious FOMO, according to Gurley and other venture capitalists, that has created a flotilla of billion-dollar startups with ever-soaring valuations and mixed financials.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club, there are now at least 73 private technology companies worth more than $1 billion dollars, versus 41 a year ago. Some, such as Uber, the $41.2 billion car hailing app backed by Gurley’s Benchmark, are worth enormous sums. At least 48 companies were valued at $1 billion or more for the first time, and another 23 members moved up the ranking after raising more money.

Many investors are treating these 73 companies as if they were publicly traded, says Gurley. They are investing sums of money usually reserved for IPO offerings and, sometimes, giving away those dollars with the kind of confidence usually associated with investors who’ve perused regulatory filings for detailed financial information. The investors themselves are a blend of traditional venture-capital players and typically public-market investors: hedge funds, mutual funds and banks. They are sort of meeting in the middle, with the venture capitalists investing in later-stage companies than they have historically done, through new growth funds, and the institutional investors getting in before the IPO.

“We’ve been calling this the private-IPO slice,” said David York, managing director of Top Tier Capital Partners, a fund of funds. “The valuation of risk is a public-market thought process versus a private-market thought process.”

Gurley, who has become a vocal critic of irrational behavior in the industry, says he’s also very worried about the pile-up in the “private IPO” market.

He’s worried that venture capitalists’ new bedfellows, such as mutual funds, are too new to venture capital to properly weigh the risks and realize that these billion-dollar companies are not guaranteed home runs.

“This replaces the IPO — but not all these companies are IPO level candidates,” he said. “Would you hand a teenager $200,000?”

According to data collected by The Journal, of the 29 firms that have invested in five or more current billion-dollar startups, only about half are traditional venture-capital firms. The rest are a mix of institutional investors, such as the Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management, and strategic investors, such as Intel and Google. Near the top of the list is Tiger with 12 investments in private billion-dollar companies, and T. Rowe Price Group with 11. In this group, Tiger also raised the most money last year, keying up $4 billion, or 12% of all venture capital raised in 2014.

With such financial heavyweights jumping in, many of their peers are wondering: Can I afford to sit out?

It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much money is sloshing around at this level. Several top venture capital firms have raised large growth funds in the past few years, but total contributions from hedge funds, mutual funds and banks is practically immeasurable without knowing how much each invested in particular funding rounds. Whatever the amount, this layer of growth capital could warp prices, venture capitalists say.

“It’s like traffic on the highway, you add just 5% more cars and it slows down traffic considerably,” said Glenn Solomon, a managing partner at GGV Capital. His firm is an investor in four companies in The Billion Dollar Startup Club.

In some ways, Gurley’s firm has benefited from this influx of pre-IPO capital. His firm is an early investor in four companies in the Billion Dollar Startup Club: Uber, Snapchat, WeWork and Jasper Technologies. All four have since raised money from a big public-market investor.

For the entire article from the Wall Street Journal, click here

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For broker-dealers, investment bankers, and those following the investment strategies of private equity and venture capital firms, this is one of the better plain-speak summaries profiling the current climate of investing in private companies. The recent outsized valuations during 2014 have caused greybeard investors to scratch their heads…as the outsized pre-IPO valuations are counter-intuitive to traditional investment analysis of private companies, particularly given the assortment of “lower-than-last-private round” post IPO valuations that these same companies are being given in the public marketplace.

For private companies that wish to network with deep-pocketed angel and/or institutional investors, Brokerdealer.com provides an investor forum that connects start-up entrepreneurs with those who can see the forest through the trees.

Below please find excerpts of Liam Denning’s reporting..

Buying a stock, with all its attendant filings, analyst coverage and forecasts, still can be a gamble. So imagine getting excited about one isolated price signal on a private company with all the disclosure of the Air Force’s Area 51.

Yet that is what is setting pulses racing as 2015 dawns. Xiaomi, a closely held Chinese smartphone maker, recently raised $1.1 billion at an implied valuation of more than $46 billion. That puts it ahead of Uber Technologies, the unlisted ride-booking application developer that got new funding in December valuing it at $41 billion. Both numbers also are higher than the market capitalizations of roughly three-quarters of the S&P 500’s members.

In theory, such startup valuations matter little to anyone but a relative handful of founders, employees and venture capitalists. The average investor doesn’t get a seat at the table or more than an occasional glimpse of what even is on the table.

In practice, news of such amazing, and seemingly unobtainable, investments stoke bullish sentiment, leaving individual investors potentially vulnerable.
Venture capitalists and other insiders usually do extensive due diligence before committing to the likes of Uber. But their basis for valuation differs from the approach of mainstream investors buying stocks, with venture funds also considering exit timelines, the cash needs of a startup to keep expanding and maintaining incentives for management and owners as equity stakes get parceled out. They also can, of course, just get things wrong.

Ordinary investors also must consider the wider context. In a world thirsting for yield amid ultralow interest rates, money has sought riskier corners of the market. Almost $24 billion of new commitments flowed to U.S. venture funds in the first nine months of 2014, according to the latest data from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. That is more than in each of the preceding five years in their entirety and sets up 2014 to have been the biggest year for new venture money since before the financial crisis.

This raises the risk of dollars being deployed into questionable businesses, which then eventually find their way into the wider market via initial public offerings, which are priced off the back of those high startup valuations.

For the entire WSJ story, please click here.

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As brokerdealers, investment bankers, institutional investors and entrepreneurs “close the books” on 2014, all will agree this has been a remarkable year in which “billion dollar valuations” have seemingly been the norm. Most notably, technological start-ups have enjoyed increasing valuations with each subsequent round of financing from private equity and venture capital firms, albeit many financial industry professionals are wondering whether those valuations can carry over when these private companies embark on initial public offerings (IPOs).

While “Wall Street” protagonist Gordon Gekko coined the phrase “Greed is Good!,” the Broker-Dealers mantra for 2014 was “Funding is Fun!”

Below please find highlights of the WSJ article.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. is now officially the world’s most valuable tech startup, worth $46 billion—the exclamation point on a year of extraordinary valuations.

Valuations placed on tech startups world-wide stretched to record heights in 2014 and accelerated at an exceptional pace, even when compared with the late 1990s dot-com boom.

Xiaomi is just the latest example. On Monday it raised more than $1 billion from investors, giving it the $46 billion overall valuation. Only Facebook Inc. raised capital at a higher value from private investors, at $50 billion in 2011.

This year, venture capitalists, mutual funds and big banks bestowed valuations of $1 billion or more on about 40 startups world-wide, doubling the number of such companies at the start of the year, according to research firm Dow Jones VentureSource.

Adjusted for inflation, the current roster of 70 “billion dollar” startups globally is nearly twice as large as the number during the boom years 1999 and 2000.

A “startup,” in this case, is loosely defined as a young, private company backed by venture capital, with overall valuations derived from the price that pre-IPO investors pay for a fraction of the equity.

Surveying the unprecedented valuations in the private market, “I have trouble drawing a parallel,” said Ted Schlein, a general partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, adding that his firm is trying to exercise “aggressive restraint” as it looks for new investments.

Perhaps more astonishing than the dollar figures was how fast they were achieved. In November, investors paid $1.2 billion for a stake in Uber Technologies Inc. that valued the five-year-old car-hailing service at $41.2 billion, almost 12 times the price set by venture capitalists last year. The valuation of Pure Storage Inc., a vendor of data-storage equipment, tripled to $3 billion in April after less than a year. Slack Technologies Inc. was valued at $1.1 billion in October only a year after releasing its popular work-collaboration product.

In short, 2014 was the year the tech sector went into hyper-drive.

Before this year, only Facebook and Chinese online retailer JD.com Inc. commanded a valuation higher than $10 billion among private companies backed by venture capitalists, according to VentureSource. This year, six startups raised capital at that level or higher.

The prevailing theory behind the investment rush: Technology is overtaking nearly every major industry, from city transportation and hospitality to education and health care. And real businesses are being built, bullish backers say, not the revenue-less startups from those heady dot-com days in the late 1990s, when excitement over the Internet led to a tech-stock bubble that burst in early 2000.

Many of the companies in today’s billion-dollar club, such as Uber, Xiaomi, home-rental site Airbnb Inc., Web storage company Dropbox Inc. and data-mining startup Palantir Inc. are said to be generating tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Airbnb, which is seeking to upend the hotel industry, was tagged with a $10 billion valuation in April, about 40 times its revenue of roughly $250 million in 2013. That revenue had doubled from the previous year, people familiar with the matter previously told The Wall Street Journal. Dropbox, also with a $10 billion valuation, had expected sales of more than $200 million in 2013, up from $116 million the year earlier.

Other companies, like messaging service Snapchat Inc. and online scrapbooking site Pinterest Inc., have barely started making money. Investors are betting those companies can capture audiences that will eventually translate into big money, à la Facebook.

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel , an early investor in Facebook, says on balance the field of startups doesn’t feel overvalued. The sum of billion-dollar-plus valuations in the U.S.—at roughly $160 billion—would still be less than half of Google Inc. ’s $365 billion market cap, he says.

Others are less sanguine.

“Without question in some sectors there is a pricing balloon bubble in late stage,” said Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark, an early investor in Uber, Dropbox and Snapchat. “At some point, these companies will be held accountable for their financials.”

The pricing party is being partly driven by the endowments, foundations and pension funds that back venture firms like Benchmark. Low interest rates and the prospect of juicy returns—inspired by success stories like Facebook, Google and Apple Inc. —are encouraging these firms to pour money into venture capital.

Venture firms have raised more than $32 billion this year, up 60% from last year’s total, though still well below the $121 billion (inflation adjusted) raised in 2000, according to VentureSource.

The latest figure, however, doesn’t include the dry powder from mutual funds such as BlackRock, T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management, or from hedge funds and big banks, all of which are bidding up prices.

Andrea Auerbach, a managing director at Cambridge Associates who meets with about 700 venture firms a year and advises foundations and other big institutional investors, says venture capitalists increasingly call her to pitch “pre-IPO funds.” The buzz-phrase conjures memories of the dot-com boom, when investors rushed into tech startups ahead of their initial public offerings. It is a sign, according to Ms. Auerbach, that investors are plowing money into startups based on momentum instead of fundamentals.

“There are managers trying to pursue this tactic—and it’s a tactic, not a strategy—of investing in pre-IPO companies,” said Ms. Auerbach. “There’s a clock on this and they’re running out of time.”

At least 30 companies have gone public in the U.S. with lower prices than they were worth in private stock sales or option grants in the prior 90 days, according to Valuation Advisors, which conducts valuations for private companies. Mr. Fenton of Benchmark sits on the board of business software company Hortonworks Inc., whose bankers cut its $1.1 billion valuation in half in December ahead of its IPO to entice investors. The maneuver worked to a degree—its stock rose 65% in the IPO. But the company, which lost $86.7 million on revenue of $33.4 million for the first nine months of the year, is trading slightly below a $1.1 billion market value.

Some warn that the winds will eventually shift in Silicon Valley and the easy money will end, possibly leading to a trail of destruction akin to the dot-com crash, including company failures and investor losses.

Mr. Fenton, whose firm Benchmark has been closely tracking companies’ spending rates this year, sees reckless behavior as the real devil underneath the big valuation numbers.

“Are we creating a generation of companies whose behavior has been poisoned by easy capital?” Mr. Fenton said.

For the entire story from WSJ, please click here.

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For most start-up businesses, money to finance the business is a key issue, in recent years, start-up businesses have been turning to crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is raising money contributions from a large number of people, typically through the use of the Internet. Some of the  more popular crowdfunding sites include GoFundMe and Kickstarter.

These kind of small businesses are the ones President Obama wanted to help in 2012 when he signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, better known as the JOBS Act. Part of the law, Title III, was intended to allow small businesses seeking capital to crowdfund, or raise money from virtually anyone, by selling stock and other securities over the Internet. “Start-ups and small business will now have access to a big, new pool of potential investors,” Mr. Obama said at the time. “For the first time, ordinary Americans will be able to go online and invest in entrepreneurs that they believe in.”

Congress directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize the rules by December 2012, but the agency has yet to do so. As it reviews Title III of the JOBS Act, a debate has raged. Supporters say crowdfunding is an innovative way to finance new ideas. Others say the high risk associated with backing early-stage businesses is inappropriate for ordinary investors.

Only accredited investors — those with annual income of more than $200,000 or $1 million in net worth not including their primary residence — are permitted to participate in crowdfunding deals. Under the proposed rules, which the S.E.C. introduced in October 2013, businesses could raise up to $1 million in a 12-month period without registering the offering with the agency.

“The goal is to democratize and improve finance,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, who worked on the House crowdfunding bill that was incorporated into the JOBS Act.

In writing its rules, the S.E.C. adopted strict requirements intended to minimize fraud and protect investors. Individuals who are not accredited investors, for instance, would face limits on how much they could invest. Businesses would be required to go through a registered broker or a new type of registered platform called a funding portal for their offerings. Businesses also would be required to submit audited financial statements. The rules are still under review and may change.

While the rules are still under review having a brokerdealer in your corner to help find smart investments to make whether it is in a small company or large corporation.

For the full story from the New York Times click here

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Raising venture capital and securing start-up funding is in full swing in this year-round season as 3 more early-stage firms raised $50 million in financing this week courtesy of leading venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and tech titan Salesforce.com.

Cincinnati-based Lisner Inc., which specializes in audio-beacon technology and embeds tones inaudible to the human ear into digital media, received $3.5mil in funding from Boston-based Progress Ventures, Jump Capital, CincyTech, Serra Ventures and Mercury Fund of Texas. The company expects to have $1mil-$2mil of revenue this year.

Skyhigh Networks scored $40mil to fund growth for its IT service that detects, identifies, scores and controls cloud services..

Yik Yak, best known as a gossip-sharing app that lets users post anonymously to forums raised $10mil

The post Venture-Capital Banking Deals of The Day; Tech Start-Ups Score Funding appeared first on BrokerDealer Blog.

The British capital is staking a claim as a global leader for financial technology start-ups.

Andrew Testa for The New York TimesTransferWise, which offers foreign exchange transfers without large bank fees, is one of the companies making up London’s growing financial technology start-up scene.

On Monday, TransferWise, one of the city’s most prominent financial technology companies, said it had raised $25 million from a range of investors, including Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and the British billionaire Richard Branson.

Started by two Estonian friends in 2011, TransferWise uses peer-to-peer technology that allows individuals around the world to swap currencies without incurring large bank transfer fees.

The company says it has processed roughly 1 billion pounds, or $1.7 billion, of transactions over the last three years, saving its customers around £45 million in banking fees that would have been incurred when sending money to another country.

The London-based start-up, which in 2013 raised $6 million from investors, including from Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Valar Ventures Management, offers foreign exchange transfers across Europe but has yet to break into the United States. (The company offers a limited product for dollar transactions that does not include using peer-to-peer technology to match customers in different countries.) The company’s largest markets are currently Britain, Germany and France.

The full article can be found at NYT DealBook.

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