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The recent Chris O’Brien post in SiliconBeat on a shrinking Silicon Valley certainly underscores both the diminished IPO activity as well as the reduced VC funding we’ve seen over the last 18 months. Funding deals and dollars invested are down upwards of 50%. Moreover, the number of VCs who are hurting (feeling the pain from their poor historical rates of return) but still active is now only slightly larger than the number who are either shuttered or qualify as the living dead. See TheFunded for detail on the latter group which by their count totaled 353 firms as of this week. One huge by-product of the VC contraction is that new VC investments are decidedly moving away from seed and early stage opportunities.

So with all this bad news one would naturally conclude that new world realities in Silicon Valley would severely dampen entrepreneurial activity. If both institutional funding at the front end and liquidity at the back end of the venture cycle are severely curtailed, entrepreneurship would naturally lessen. But ironically the reverse is actually true as local new business activity is as strong as ever. So what’s going on? (more…)

Welcome to The Brenner Banner, where Silicon Valley finance and accounting experts share their insights on interim management news and trends in the technology industry.

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