Startups Venture

Keeping Up With The Venture Cycle

Morning Markets: Can’t keep up with the venture market? Here’s why.

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The venture market is still hot as 2019 begins, with new super- and hypergiant rounds coming in, money being found for scooter companies, and even crypto shops unveiling a grip of new investments. Today’s venture pace makes it feel like the late-2018 doom and gloom brought on by stock market worries has passed.

But keeping up is busy work. This morning, after sitting down to write you a note on the current state of the private capital markets, I read through a list of recent venture investments. It’s something I do nearly every day (I’m lazy, so I usually just scan the featured investment section of Crunchbase.com), and I always find a few things that matter that I’ve missed.

This morning, however, I noticed the number of investments that have occurred in the last day or so. According to Crunchbase data, there have been at least 73 known investments since yesterday from angel rounds on up. That’s six dozen with an extra as spare.

How many can you name without cheating? If it’s more than two, give yourself a high-five.

The day before today the figure was 106. Of course, most of these rounds were baked long before we counted them, and are only being announced and recorded now, but the lag between wire transfers and public knowledge doesn’t make the sheer pace of investment any less boggling.

The team and I do write about some venture rounds, but not as many as we could if we wanted; we could easily stop covering trends, or digging into sectors and just cover venture rounds one-by-one. But if we did, we’d wind up addressing maybe five percent of the total, instead of our current one or two percent, leaving you far less informed in the process.

In short, we try to look macro more than micro as there are too many individual data points to tabulate granularly. You can’t sift them one-by-one and see much. It would be like trying to stack sand grains on top of each other to measure out an inch.

All the above sums to the question we answer each day: Which venture rounds should we cover, and how many is enough?

Largely, the Crunchbase News team digs into companies that share the most, or make the most noise. The sharing point is easy to understand. If a startup raising a Series C will share hard revenue date, the chances of my caring about its new investment, for example, goes from slim to large. Tell me that your Series D firm is going public in a bit so I should talk to the CEO now about her latest capital event, and I’m on the phone. But those examples are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the rounds that reach our ears.

Regarding noise, bigger rounds are louder. It’s why we’ve covered every Slack round since we started Crunchbase News back in early 2017, but nearly never touch seed investments.

Perhaps there’s a better way to sift the influx. We’re working on it. Wrapping this short set of thoughts, I want to invite your notes and complaints. It’s the new year and we’re hammering out our coverage plans for 2019 and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Ping me at alex at crunchbase dot com, or say hi on Twitter.

Onward, and may the IPO market open soon before I die of boredom.

Top Image Credit: Li-Anne Dias.

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