Late Stage Mature Pre IPO Unicorns - PreIPOSwap.com

The Startup Bubble Is A Derivative Of The Stock Market Bubble

From Real Investment Advice, Nov 15 2018:

TechCrunch recently posted a fascinating chart of the monthly count of global VC deals that raised $100 million or more since 2007. According to this chart, a new “unicorn” startup was born every four days in 2018. Unfortunately, this is even more evidence of the tech startup bubble that I have been warning about.

Big Funding Rounds

Here’s the list of “unicorn” companies worth more than $1 billion as of the third quarter of 2018:

unicorn-q1-3-2018

The world has gone completely startup crazy over the last several years. Spurred by soaring tech stock prices (a byproduct of the U.S. stock market bubble) and the frothy Fed-driven economic environment, countless entrepreneurs and VCs are looking to launch the next Facebook or Google. Following in the footsteps of the dot-com companies in the late-1990s, startups that actually turn a profit are the rare exceptions. Unfortunately, today’s tech startup bubble is going to end just like the dot-com bubble did: scores of startups are going to fold and founders, VCs, and investors are going to lose their shirts.

The chart below shows the Nasdaq Composite Index and the two bubbles that formed in it in the past two decades. Lofty tech stock prices and valuations encourage the tech startup bubble because publicly traded tech companies have more buying power with which to acquire tech startups and because they allow startups to IPO at very high valuations.

Nasdaq Composite Index

In the chart below, I compared TechCrunch’s monthly global VC deals chart to the Nasdaq Composite Index and they line up perfectly. Surges in the Nasdaq lead to surges in VC deals, while lulls or declines in the Nasdaq lead to lulls or declines in VC deals (yes, I’m aware that correlation is not necessarily causation, but there is a causal relationship in this case).

VC Deals vs. Nasdaq

Please watch my recent presentation about the U.S. stock market bubble to learn more:

I believe that a very high percentage of today’s startups are actually malinvestments that only exist due to the false signal created when the Fed and other central banks distorted the financial markets and economy with their aggressive monetary stimulus programs after the global financial crisis. See this definition of malinvestment from the Mises Wiki:

Malinvestment is a mistaken investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the reallocation of resources to more productive uses. “Wrong” in this sense means incorrect or mistaken from the point of view of the real long-term needs and demands of the economy, if those needs and demands were expressed with the correct price signals in the free market. Random, isolated entrepreneurial miscalculations and mistaken investments occur in any market (resulting in standard bankruptcies and business failures) but systematic, simultaneous and widespread investment mistakes can only occur through systematically distorted price signals, and these result in depressions or recessions. Austrians believe systemic malinvestments occur because of unnecessary and counterproductive intervention in the free market, distorting price signals and misleading investors and entrepreneurs. For Austrians, prices are an essential information channel through which market participants communicate their demands and cause resources to be allocated to satisfy those demands appropriately. If the government or banks distort, confuse or mislead investors and market participants by not permitting the price mechanism to work appropriately, unsustainable malinvestment will be the inevitable result.

Rising interest rates and the overall tightening monetary environment will lead to the popping of today’s stock market bubble, which will then spill over into the tech startup bubble.