Could Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler join Warren Buffet on the next high profile business panel? Maybe so, and maybe it would help. Allow me to explain: Pretty much since the cooling of the earth’s crust, venture capitalists have relied on taking their companies public via IPO in order to cash out with huge profits. The public gets stock in companies like Google and the VCs get more money to invest in more companies, companies that may be owned you or your customers. It is a crucial part of our overall economic engine.
One of my favorite blogs, Texas Startup Blog, recently pointed out that in Q2 there was not one single IPO in the entire USA that came from a venture backed deal. On July 1, responding to the same observation, the National Venture Capital Association announced what they called a ‘capital crisis for the start-up community.’ There is no debate that this economic cardiac arrest suggests rough days ahead. The debate is over who can fix it.
Enter Seth and Amy, co-anchors of SNL’s Weekend Update.
Position #1: Articulated best by Paul Kedrosky in his Infectious Greed blog, where he described Silicon Valley as being in its own bubble and focusing on things Wall Street doesn’t find interesting. Position #2: The National Venture Capital Association surveyed its members and reported 77% said the problem was skittish investors.
These opposing arguments don’t belong in the bowels of financial or business blogs. They belong on Saturday Night Live. Seth and Amy’s famous sarcastic bit is the best response for both positions, a word that brings instant clarity and empowerment to those lost in trying to figure out which side to believe: “REALLY?” Here’s a stab at how the next Weekend Update “Really? With Seth and Amy” segment might go:
Seth: For three consecutive months, Wall Street couldn’t find one business in the entire USA that could be deemed worthy of receiving money from a few hundred million potential people in the US and the rest of the free world.
Seth and Amy: REALLY?
Amy: VCs have long hammered entrepreneurs to know their customers, get their message right and connect with their audience. They have particularly been hard on entrepreneurs who insist on projecting their own interests on a disinterested market and expecting the market will see the light. Wall Street IPO backers are the customers of VCs. And now we hear that the VCs are playing with investments Wall Street doesn’t find interesting.
Seth and Amy: REALLY?
Seth: With social networking, the Internet in general and Skype video calling, we can communicate across the world like it’s just down the street. The US is one of the largest economic markets in the world. And yet no one in Latin America, Europe or Asia could find any American partners with whom to build a business that would be worth telling the rest of us about through an IPO.
Seth and Amy: REALLY?
Amy: In other news, Congress today killed the tax credits for investing in alternative energy sources, even though the Midwestern US is considered to be the Saudi Arabia of wind power and we could end our dependency on foreign oil. Congress disputed the facts, saying, “No one blows more hot air than us.”
Okay, so maybe I don’t quit my day job in the hopes of writing for SNL, but I would like to raise these questions:
Have investors become so spoiled that now every entrepreneur must have the next Google to have the next chance at anything in the public arena?
Has the VC community lost sight of its own wisdom and lost touch with its audience?
Have entrepreneurs and innovators stopped innovating in the hopes of just copycatting what made someone else rich?
When sellers lose touch with their audience, the audience finds another seller to supply what it wants. Is it time we say a collective “REALLY” and take back some of the power from those who have lost touch and stopped listening?
What do you think? Speak up, it’s time to be heard.
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