The 2008 Venture Capital Outlook

VCs want to ride the momentum from NetSuite's Dec. 20 IPO into the New Year and cash out of companies they've held in their portfolios for years

by Aaron Ricadela

Things are finally looking up for venture capital investors. The initial-public-offering market, which provides the biggest opportunity for VCs to cash out, continues to recover from its mid-decade doldrums. It got a big boost on Dec. 20 when software maker NetSuite (N) raised $161 million in its highly anticipated IPO. And the median buyout price of venture-backed companies continues to rise.

Riding that momentum, VCs expect 2008 to be the year that they finally start to unload companies in their portfolios that have been absorbing cash for years. A survey of 170 VCs released by the National Venture Capital Assn. on Dec. 17 showed that 59% of venture investors expect the market for IPOs to strengthen in 2008. Nearly three-quarters expect merger-and-acquisition transaction values—already nearly double 2005 levels—to either increase or remain the same in 2007.

But optimism is a relative concept for the folks who have been pumping millions of dollars into Internet, clean technology, and life sciences companies. "If you want to put money into a sector that's going to do well next year, tech is looking more and more attractive," says Duncan Davidson, a venture partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners. But that's partly because everything else looks so bad. Real estate, commodities, oil, and China have all hit their peaks, he says.

Financial Sector Woes Could Hurt Online Ads

And the truth is, despite a few hot IPOs, VCs will continue to find it challenging to generate the kind of home-run returns they count on to turn a profit, which is typically at least 10 times their initial investment. Their portfolios are filled with companies that survived the dropoff in technology spending earlier this decade. Today those companies are generating steadily growing sales.

But truly blockbuster Web companies, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, may wait until 2009 to go public. And the spreading woes of the financial sector could throttle the rapidly expanding market for online advertising, a key revenue source for Web startups. "The ride won't be smooth. It will probably be bumpy," says Deborah Farrington, a general partner at StarVest Partners in New York, which invested in NetSuite and backs other software companies.

VCs will have sunk more than $40 billion worldwide into startups in 2007, up from $37.3 billion in 2006, according to market researcher Dow Jones VentureOne (NWS). That's still well short of the $56 billion VCs plowed into startups in 2001, but up by more than a third compared with the Death Valley days of 2003 and 2004. Among the hot investment areas in 2008, VCs surveyed by the NVCA pointed to clean technology, media and Internet companies, and biotechnology outfits.

A Far Cry from the Dot-Com Boom

On the return side, 80 venture-backed companies went public in 2007, up from 57 in 2006, according to an NVCA estimate. That includes standouts like NetSuite—which ended its first day of trading up 36% (BusinessWeek.com, 12/19/07) after doubling its offering price in an auction—and software company VMware, whose shares are up about 60% since their Aug. 14 debut.

But 2007's IPO count is a fraction of the 260 such companies that went public during the dot-com boom in 1999 and the 264 that did so in 2000, according to data from the NVCA and Thomson Financial (TOC).