“Sixteen months ago, I predicted 2017 would be “the best year for tech IPOs since the dot-com heyday almost two decades ago.”
Well, that was not exactly what happened — though 2017 was a good year for IPOs compared to previous years. Despite strong public markets, where we saw the NASDAQ jump 28 percent and the Dow by 25 percent — there were 59 VC-backed IPOs, which was an improvement over the 41 we had in 2016 (2018 NVCA Yearbook) — last year was far from the torrent I expected. One key reason was concerns by private companies that public valuations might not give private investors a solid gain. At the same time, there was abundant private capital for those companies, so IPOs were not critical for raising capital.”
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