From the San Francisco Business Times
At the Bloomberg Technology Conference Tuesday, Marc Andreessen shrugged off talk of a Silicon Valley downturn, stressing that “good companies are getting funded, good products are doing very well, and markets are much bigger than they used to be.”
But as for those companies’ exit prospects, the Andreesen Horowitz founder corroborated expectations that the IPO market will remain slow, with very few companies going public until “2017 or 2018,” he said.
“It’s much harder to be a public company now than it used to be: Harder to go public and to be public,” Andreesen said. “On the other hand, we think the pendulum has swung too far against going public.”
He added that Andreessen-Horowitz, which recently closed a $1.5 billion round of fundraising, had added an ‘IPO preparedness’ group for its portfolio companies.
“The companies that do this get better, and become more attractive acquisitions, because it makes them more mature companies,” he said.
In lieu of those IPOs, he said, we can expect a slew of mergers and acquisitions for the remainder of this year and into 2017.
Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn this week is a harbinger of more acquisition activity among large, wealthy tech giants – companies like Google(NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) or Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) – who have done well in the last few years, he said.
