The American Federal Reserve looks likely to increase interest rates. And one consequence is that money in the stock market is flowing to financials, like banks.
Who will get hurt?
Usually, money to invest in startups, the critical point in innovation & creativity, comes from Venture Capital. And what are Venture Capitals? There are many types of Venture Capitals, such as private money but there are also venture capitals that raise money from the public.
With money moving into NYSE heading to financials, what would happen to money heading to Venture Capital and other like Private Equity?
Additionally, raising interest rate is in simple terms, increasing the price of money. What does increasing the price of money have on startups?
In sum, the USA Fed, could be hurting American startups and innovation, through increasing interest rates, that we are seeing money flow to NYSE listed financials and also the price of money is increasing.
Venture capital
VC is a type of private equity,[1] a form of financing that is provided by firms or funds to small, early-stage, emerging firms that are deemed to have high growth potential, or which have demonstrated high growth (in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, or both). Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake, in the companies they invest in. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from the high technologyindustries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
The typical venture capital investment occurs after an initial “seed funding” round. The first round of institutional venture capital to fund growth is called the Series A round. Venture capitalists provide this financing in the interest of generating a return through an eventual “exit” event, such as the company selling shares to the public for the first time in an initial public offering (IPO) or doing a merger and acquisition (also known as a “trade sale”) of the company.
In addition to angel investing, equity crowdfunding and other seed funding options, venture capital is attractive for new companies with limited operating history that are too small to raise capital in the public markets and have not reached the point where they are able to secure a bank loan or complete a debt offering. In exchange for the high risk that venture capitalists assume by investing in smaller and early-stage companies, venture capitalists usually get significant control over company decisions, in addition to a significant portion of the companies’ ownership (and consequently value). Start-ups like Uber, Airbnb, Flipkart, ReviewAdda, Xiaomi & Didi Chuxing are highly valued startups, where venture capitalists contribute more than financing to these early-stage firms; they also often provide strategic advice to the firm’s executives on its business model and marketing strategies.
Venture capital is also a way in which the private and public sectors can construct an institution that systematically creates business networks for the new firms and industries, so that they can progress and develop. This institution helps identify promising new firms and provide them with finance, technical[2] expertise, mentoring, marketing “know-how”, and business models. Once integrated into the business network, these firms are more likely to succeed, as they become “nodes” in the search networks for designing and building products in their domain.[3] However, venture capitalists’ decisions are often biased, exhibiting for instance overconfidence and illusion of control, much like entrepreneurial decisions in general.[4]
A venture may be defined as a project prospective converted into a process with an adequate assumed risk and investment. With few exceptions, private equity in the first half of the 20th century was the domain of wealthy individuals and families. The Wallenbergs, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and Warburgs were notable investors in private companies in the first half of the century. In 1938, Laurance S. Rockefeller helped finance the creation of both Eastern Air Lines and Douglas Aircraft, and the Rockefeller family had vast holdings in a variety of companies. Eric M. Warburg founded E.M. Warburg & Co. in 1938, which would ultimately become Warburg Pincus, with investments in both leveraged buyouts and venture capital. The Wallenberg family started Investor AB in 1916 in Sweden and were early investors in several Swedish companies such as ABB, Atlas Copco, Ericsson, etc. in the first half of the 20th century.
Private Equity
Before World War II (1939–1945), money orders (originally known as “development capital”) remained primarily the domain of wealthy individuals and families. Only after 1945 did “true” private equity investments begin to emerge, notably with the founding of the first two venture capital firms in 1946: American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) and J.H. Whitney & Company.[5][6]
Georges Doriot, the “father of venture capitalism”[7] (and former assistant dean of Harvard Business School), founded INSEAD in 1957. Along with Ralph Flanders and Karl Compton (former president of MIT), Doriot founded ARDC in 1946 to encourage private-sector investment in businesses run by soldiers returning from World War II. ARDC became the first institutional private-equity investment firm to raise capital from sources other than wealthy families, although it had several notable investment successes as well.[8] ARDC is credited[by whom?] with the first trick when its 1957 investment of $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) would be valued at over $355 million after the company’s initial public offering in 1968 (representing a return of over 1200 times on its investment and an annualized rate of return of 101%).[9]
Former employees of ARDC went on to establish several prominent venture-capital firms including Greylock Partners (founded in 1965 by Charlie Waite and Bill Elfers) and Morgan, Holland Ventures, the predecessor of Flagship Ventures (founded in 1982 by James Morgan).[10] ARDC continued investing until 1971, when Doriot retired. In 1972 Doriot merged ARDC with Textron after having invested in over 150 companies.
John Hay Whitney (1904–1982) and his partner Benno Schmidt (1913–1999) founded J.H. Whitney & Company in 1946. Whitney had been investing since the 1930s, founding Pioneer Pictures in 1933 and acquiring a 15% interest in Technicolor Corporation with his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. Florida Foods Corporation proved Whitney’s most famous investment. The company developed an innovative method for delivering nutrition to American soldiers, later known as Minute Maid orange juice and was sold to The Coca-Cola Company in 1960. J.H. Whitney & Company continued to make investments in leveraged buyout transactions and raised $750 million for its sixth institutional private equity fund in 2005.
Silicon Valley:
A highway exit for Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, where many Bay Area venture capital firms are based
One of the first steps toward a professionally managed venture capital industry was the passage of the Small Business Investment Act of 1958. The 1958 Act officially allowed the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to license private “Small Business Investment Companies” (SBICs) to help the financing and management of the small entrepreneurial businesses in the United States.[11]
During the 1950s, putting a venture capital deal together may have required the help of two or three other organizations to compete the transaction. It was a business that was growing very rapidly, and as the business grew, the transactions grew exponentially.[12]
During the 1960s and 1970s, venture capital firms focused their investment activity primarily on starting and expanding companies. More often than not, these companies were exploiting breakthroughs in electronic, medical, or data-processing technology. As a result, venture capital came to be almost synonymous with technology finance. An early West Coast venture capital company was Draper and Johnson Investment Company, formed in 1962[13] by William Henry Draper III and Franklin P. Johnson, Jr. In 1965, Sutter Hill Ventures acquired the portfolio of Draper and Johnson as a founding action. Bill Draper and Paul Wythes were the founders, and Pitch Johnson formed Asset Management Company at that time.
It is commonly noted that the first venture-backed startup is Fairchild Semiconductor (which produced the first commercially practical integrated circuit), funded in 1959 by what would later become Venrock Associates.[14] Venrock was founded in 1969 by Laurance S. Rockefeller, the fourth of John D. Rockefeller’s six children as a way to allow other Rockefeller children to develop exposure to venture capital investments.
It was also in the 1960s that the common form of private equity fund, still in use today, emerged. Private equity firms organized limited partnerships to hold investments in which the investment professionals served as general partner and the investors, who were passive limited partners, put up the capital. The compensation structure, still in use today, also emerged with limited partners paying an annual management fee of 1.0–2.5% and a carried interest typically representing up to 20% of the profits of the partnership.
The growth of the venture capital industry was fueled by the emergence of the independent investment firms on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital in 1972. Located in Menlo Park, CA, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and later venture capital firms would have access to the many semiconductorcompanies based in the Santa Clara Valley as well as early computer firms using their devices and programming and service companies.[15]
Throughout the 1970s, a group of private equity firms, focused primarily on venture capital investments, would be founded that would become the model for later leveraged buyout and venture capital investment firms. In 1973, with the number of new venture capital firms increasing, leading venture capitalists formed the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The NVCA was to serve as the industry trade group for the venture capital industry.[16] Venture capital firms suffered a temporary downturn in 1974, when the stock market crashed and investors were naturally wary of this new kind of investment fund.
It was not until 1978 that venture capital experienced its first major fundraising year, as the industry raised approximately $750 million. With the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1974, corporate pension funds were prohibited from holding certain risky investments including many investments in privately held companies. In 1978, the US Labor Department relaxed certain of the ERISA restrictions, under the “prudent man rule,”[17] thus allowing corporate pension funds to invest in the asset class and providing a major source of capital available to venture capitalists.
Terence American News 