The Changing Venture Landscape

The world around us is being disrupted by the acceleration of technology into more industries and more consumer applications. Society is reorienting to a new post-pandemic norm — even before the pandemic itself has been fully tamed. And the loosening of federal monetary policies, particularly in the US, has pushed more dollars into the venture ecosystems at every stage of financing.We have global opportunities from these trends but of course also big challenges. Technology solutions are now used by authoritarians to monitor and control populations, to stymie an individual company’s economic prospects or to foment chaos through demagoguery. We also have a world that is, as Thomas Friedman so elegantly put it — “Hot, Flat & Crowded.”With the enormous changes to our economies and financial markets — how on Earth could the venture capital market stand still? Of course we can’t. The landscape is literally and figuratively changing under our feet.What Has Changed in Financing?One of the most common questions I’m asked by people intrigued by but also scared by venture capital and technology markets is some variant of, “Aren’t technology markets way overvalued? Are we in a bubble?”I often answer the same way …*******“First, yes, nearly every corner of our market is over-valued. By definition — I’m over-paying for every