This can’t be good:
Brenon Daly, who tracks IPOs and mergers in the technology and telecom industries for the 451 Group in San Francisco, said both the avenues VCs use to achieve liquidity have been drying up for months.
“The IPO market is dead,” Daly said flatly. Acquisitions had been strong through 2007, when big firms spent $476 billion to buy 3,559 smaller firms in Daly’s market, but a good chunk of that activity was buyouts by private-equity firms like the flailing Carlyle Group, now caught in the credit crunch. So that means fewer M&A buyers in 2008, he said.
Having recently left one privately-held firm for another, this is the last thing I wanted to hear, but facts are facts and we all have to face them. It’s a damn shame that the crisis in the mortgage markets would reach out and smack down promising high tech IPOs, but it has.