经济管理专业外文翻译---风险投资行业面临“中年危机.doc

1、Mid-life Crisis? Venture Capital Acts Its AgeThe bursting of the Internet bubble, several years of unfriendly public markets, and changes in Wall Street and financial regulations have been hard on venture capital over the past decade. But not all the pressures facing the industry are external, espec

2、ially in Silicon Valley. The venture community there is showing signs of middle age - moving more slowly and cautiously than before, and hitting fewer home runs than it did in younger, leaner days. As a result, experts say, the sector is having trouble producing the robust performance long associate

3、d with it. This means investors need to look at venture capital, and its impact on their portfolios, in a new way. For context, consider that back in 1995, Fortune magazine published a story questioning whether venture capital was getting too big and institutionalized to do what it did best: Generat

4、e big returns for investors by finding an entrepreneur in a garage with a good idea, and giving him the money and support needed to grow. One sign of this unhealthy bigness, according to the article, was that the industry had raised an unprecedented $5 billion in 1994. By comparison, VC firms raised

5、 $7.5 billion in the first half of 2010, according to Dow Jones LP Source. To observers, the 2010 number represents both a comeback (firms raised nearly $1 billion less in the same period last year) and a rightsizing (the companies raised more than $14 billion in the first half of 2008, which is sta

6、rtling given the downward slide on Wall Street and in the economy as a whole later that year.)But the criticisms in the Fortune article - that increasingly fat funds and accompanying fees were changing the venture firms business model, and that the more money VCs raise, the harder it is to find comp

7、anies that can generate big enough returns - still hang over Sandhill Road (the Menlo Park, Calif., street where a number of firms are located). In 1995, $250 million constituted a mega-fund; today, its not unusual for a single firm to have more than $1 billion under management (via overlapping fund

8、s) or for a single fund to be $500 million or more. This time around, the VC community is also faced with a potent cocktail of high purchase valuations, long holding periods and cheaper exits, which are knocking the firms for a loop. But those problems would go away, or become smaller, if fund sizes

9、 shrank. The capital overhang has fluctuated a bit, but for the most part there is still a huge amount of money out there, says Bo Brustkern, a former venture capitalist who now runs Denver-based valuation firm Arcstone Partners. Its a problem because it means that theres always money flowing throug

10、h. Institutional investors look at the top 25 firms and cant get in. They look at the next 25, and theyre closed too, so you go to the next 25 and on downward until you find a firm to put your money into. All of those firms - the excellent, the good and the so-so - compete to place their cash into c

11、ompanies that need large venture investments, and that have the potential to multiply them several times over. The trouble, of course, is that there are not a lot of places to put $30 million, notes Chris Sacca, one of a handful of an emerging group of super angels who are raising small funds (anywh

12、ere from a few million dollars up to about $100 million) and investing in startups that need thousands of dollars, rather than millions, to get where they need to go. The competition to buy is keeping valuations inflated, according to experts. And the need to invest in six-figure chunks often means

13、coming on board later in a startups life cycle, when theres less risk and more ability to put large amounts of money to work. But at that point, its also harder to attain the multiples the firms investors, or limited partners, have grown used to. Moreover, the bigger the funds get, the less the gene

14、ral partners financial interests are aligned with those of their investors. This is because firms get the same 1% or 2% annual management fee and 20% of returns (the carry) that they did when their funds were much smaller. The carry was supposed to be how they made money, while the annual fee was me

15、ant to cover operating expenses during the years the money was being invested. But those expenses arent likely to be three or five or seven times bigger just because a firms latest fund is. So management fees have become an important source of profits for VC firms, especially those that have posted

16、weak and negative returns to their investors in the post-2000 years. Fund size is down, but not dramatically; theyre still oversized because of that fee addiction, notes Sacca.Long-term TrendsThis is not to say that the venture industrys days are numbered or that bushy-tailed entrepreneurs arent fin

17、ding the capital they need; far from it. But the flow of new funds to VCs is constricting and the industry is consolidating, says Wharton professor of entrepreneurship Raffi Amit. In 2009, there were still more VC firms than there were in 1999, according to the National Venture Capital Association,

18、but there were 10% fewer venture professionals and 15% fewer funds. This signals that the dead wood is working itself out of the industry finally, Brustkern suggests. You have all these firms that are victims of the delayed or never-happening exit. They invested in their companies years ago, and are

19、nt getting fees anymore and havent raised a new fund, but have a fiduciary responsibility to keep their doors open until the fund winds down. Theyre the walking dead.Yet the industry is seeing plenty of the long-term trends and disruptive technologies that create opportunities. The life science sect

20、ors in the United States are still robust, and cleantech - including clean energy, and environmental and green products and services - is providing an entirely new and promising channel for venture money. Moreover, these companies seem well suited to receive money from todays bigger VC funds, notes

21、David Wessels, an adjunct professor of finance at Wharton. Taking a new drug, medical device, or wind or solar technology from conception to market requires time and sizable sums of money. But the payoff on a breakthrough biotech therapy can be sizable. And cleantech companies have been able to do t

22、he nearly impossible lately: generate excitement in a depressed IPO market, as evidenced by Teslas recent first-day run-up. Tesla is a bellwether that people are interested in these alternative energy technologies, says Robin Vasan, a managing director at Mayfield, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based VC firm

23、 that has three energy technology companies in its portfolio. Meanwhile, Anthony Hoberman, who advises investors on venture investments at Glenrock Capital Advisors in New York, points out that several technology trends - including the rise of wireless communication, social media platforms like Face

24、book, and cloud computing services for businesses and consumers - are creating an environment where venture capitalists tend to do well. The firms invest in small companies that use their agility to overtake bigger, well-funded companies, he adds. That agility is the advantage the VCs exploit, and i

25、ts no good during periods of slow, predictable change. Vasan, whose focus is software investments, concurs. The growth of social media, smartphones and tablet applications, and web-based software products for consumers and businesses are probably five to ten year trends, he says. Bets have been plac

26、ed over the past year and more bets will be placed over the next year or two.Adjusting ExpectationsBut finding companies that are interesting and viable, and that will earn a good return for their founders, is not the same as identifying companies that will provide the multiples that venture investo

27、rs are seeking.Conventional wisdom says that a VC firm has to expect about half of the companies in its portfolio to fail, a few to earn decent returns and one or two to hit home runs big enough to make the numbers work. Without a robust IPO market, however, those out-of-the-park homeruns are few an

28、d far between. The majority of VC-backed companies have been acquired in the past few years. Unlike with an IPO, where the sky is the limit if a company can generate enough buzz, there is a cap on how much an M&A deal is likely to net. With so many science and technology companies looking for acquir

29、ers, flusher buyers like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson can hold prices down. All in all, the exits VCs are managing to secure, even via the public markets, dont put them ahead of their losses and fees by big enough margins. You cant have six failures if your successes are g

30、oing to have a cap on them, Wessels points out.Look at the recent numbers: Venture-backed companies that went public in this years second quarter took a median of 9.4 years to achieve liquidity, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. The $70 million median amount of venture capital these companies ra

31、ised prior to liquidity was 65% higher than even a year ago.Meanwhile, in that same 2010 quarter, 15 IPOs by venture-backed companies raised $899 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Seventy-nine M&A deals raised $4.3 billion in the same quarter. The IPOs had an average value of just under

32、 $60 million, while the M&A deals averaged only slightly less at $54 million. If one doesnt count Tesla, which raised large sums even by todays standards and accounted for $202 million of that IPO money, the 14 remaining deals only averaged $50 million apiece, trailing the M&A deals - hardly the gra

33、nd slams the sector needs to get its numbers up.The dot-com bubble is becoming a distant event, and falling off the horizon for return calculations, Amit notes. Indeed, 2009 is the first post-bubble year to exclude 1999 from 10-year returns. Returns fell last year to a 1% loss, from a 35% gain as of

34、 the end of 2008. Five-year returns managed to outpace the public market indexes but still barely topped 4%. These are average numbers, but, Amit says, most funds today are showing negative returns to their limited partners.For returns to pick up, valuations have to come down, exit values have to go

35、 up or holding periods have to get shorter, Hoberman suggests. None of these events is likely to happen quickly, which means investors need to adjust their expectations. Reaping 30% returns is unrealistic for any unleveraged investment, says Wessels, who believes funds can easily keep pace with the

36、public markets, but didnt offer a prediction as to whether they could consistently beat them in the foreseeable future.Go back to 1990s and venture capital was about starting a company, making it large enough to have an impact on its own and taking it public so it would be Wal-Mart or Procter & Gamb

37、le in 20 years, he says. Lately, its becoming a surrogate for internal R&D. Start-ups set out to build a product from scratch, prove it has legs with a small market and get swallowed by a larger company. So why invest in these illiquid, high-risk funds? For diversification, he notes. Youre betting o

38、n stable returns and the opportunity to already be in the game in case something develops that will be the next big thing. FROM:National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entryTitle: Mid-life Crisis? Venture Capital Acts Its Age / editor,Chunlai Chen.Published : 2010.08.18 中文译文风险投资行业面临

39、“中年危机”？过去十年来，互联网泡沫的破裂，公共市场持续数年的低迷，华尔街发生的巨大变化，以及金融监管措施的出台，让风险投资举步维艰。但是，这个行业面临的压力并非全部来自外部，对硅谷来说尤为如此。在硅谷，风险投资行业正在呈现步入中年的迹象与更年轻、更精干的时候相比，现在风险投资业的行动更为迟缓和谨小慎微了，同时大获全胜的案例也更少见。专家认为，结果是，这个长期以来一直创造强劲业绩的行业陷入了困境。这意味着投资者必须要以全新的方式，来审视风险投资对自己投资组合的影响。为了解这一变化的脉络，我们不妨回顾一下1995年的情况，那一年，财富（Fortune）杂志刊载了一篇文章，对风险投资的规模是否过大

40、以及把他们最擅长的工作制度化提出了质疑。他们最擅长的工作就是：通过发现车库里拥有绝妙创想的企业家，并向其提供发展资金和其他支持，为投资者创造巨额回报。这篇文章认为，风险投资庞大得陷入病态的一个表征就是，1994年全年，这个行业募集到了规模空前的50亿美元资金。道琼斯旗下机构Dow Jones LP Source的数据显示，在2010年上半年，风险投资机构募集到了75亿美元。在观察家们看来，2010年的数字表明资金已经回流（去年同期，风险投资机构募集到的资金比今年少近10亿美元），同时表明募集资金的规模正在恢复。2008年上半年，风险投资公司募集的资金超过了140亿美元，考虑到当年华尔街的颓势和

41、后半年整体经济的衰退，这个数字可谓令人震惊。但是，财富杂志的那篇文章评论称，日渐庞大的风险投资基金以及与之相伴的费用，正在改变风险投资机构的商业模式，虽然募集到的资金大幅增多，却难以找到能够带来巨额投资回报的投资对象，这个问题今天依然盘桓在沙丘路（Sandhill Road）（位于加利福尼亚州门罗帕克（Menlo Park），为很多风险投资机构所在地。）地区。1995年，2.5亿美元就能组建一个“大基金”（mega-fund），而今天，单个机构管理10多亿美元，或者单笔投资达到5亿美元以上的情况已经屡见不鲜了。目前，还有些其他更复杂的问题，比如高估值，持有周期很长，退出价格低等让风险投资机构颇

42、感烦扰。如果基金的规模缩小，那么这些问题至少能有所缓解。“资金的供应量有些波动，但是，对大部分风投机构来说，还是有很多资金的。” 前风险投资家，目前负责运营设在丹佛的价值评估机构艾克斯通合伙公司（Arcstone Partners）的布拉科（Bo Brustkern）谈到。“这确实是个问题，钱始终都是在流动着的。机构投资者先是寻求25家顶尖级的风投机构，却无缘进入。之后开始寻求位次排在下面的25家，可那些公司也关闭了投资的入口，所以，他们只能再次退而求其次。他们的眼光不断下移，直到找到一家可以将资金投入的风投公司为止。”所有的风投机构无论是业绩卓越还是表现平平的机构都竞相在需要大笔风险投资的企

43、业中投资；所以，风投数额有可能会超过企业需求的数倍。但是问题在于，“没有多少公司可以容得下3000万美元的投资。” “超级天使基金”（super angels）的克莉丝塞卡（Chris Sacca）谈到，超级天使基金是正在浮出水面的投资机构群体，它们募集小额资金（从几百万到1亿美元不等），并将这些资金投资于需要数千美元而不是数百万美元的初创企业，以满足它们发展的需要。专家认为，风险投资机构竞相购买，导致投资对象的价格不断攀升。必须要投入六位数的资金往往意味着，在初创企业的生命周期中，它们进入的时机较晚，因为这时候，企业的风险已经较小，企业也有了运作大笔资金的更强能力。但是，在这种时候投资，就很

44、难获得他们已经习以为常的数倍投资回报了。此外，风险资本的规模越大，一般合伙人与其投资者之间经济利益的一致性也就越差。因为无论资本规模大小，风投机构的年度管理费同样为1%或者2%，投资回报率同样都是20%。本来，投资回报才是风险投资公司盈利的途径，而年度管理费则是用来支付公司在投资期间的经营费用的。可是，运营成本并不会因为资本规模扩大而同比例扩大。所以，对风险投资机构来说，管理费用已经成了重要的盈利来源，这对那些2000年以后投资回报欠佳甚至亏损的风险投资机构来说更是如此。“因为有管理费用的诱惑，风险投资公司依然想把基金规模做大。”塞卡指出。长期趋势这并不是说风险投资行业的日子已经屈指可数了，也

45、不是说精明强干的创业企业家不会去寻找自己所需的资金了，事实远非如此。但是，“流向风险投资公司的新资金确实在减少，同时，这个行业正在经历合并风潮。”沃顿商学院创业学教授拉斐尔阿密特（Raffi Amit）谈到。美国风险投资协会（National Venture Capital Association）的数据显示，虽然2009年的风投机构数量依然超过1999年的水平，不过，风投专业人员的数量却减少了10%，同时，基金的数量也降低了15%。这表明，“那些行将就木的机构最终退出了这个行业。” 布拉科认为。“所有那些延误了退出时机或者根本就没有退出的风投机构成了牺牲品。数年前，他们将资金投入了企业，但是

46、并没有得到更多的管理费用，也没有募集到新资金；可他们同时要承担着信托责任，直到资金日趋减少。这些基金最终变成了行尸走肉。”然而，这个行业同时也看到，有许多长期趋势以及颠覆性科技（disruptive technology）（也称为“破坏性技术”、“突破性科技”）正在创造投资的良机。在美国，生命科学产业依然表现强劲，包括清洁能源、环境保护和绿色产品和服务在内的清洁技术，为风险投资提供了全新的而且是前途无量的渠道。此外，这类公司似乎非常适合从规模更大的风险投资基金接受资金，沃顿商学院金融学副教授大卫威塞尔斯（David Wessels）谈到。将一种新药、医疗设备、风能技术和太阳能技术从概念转变成商

47、品，不但需要时间，而且也需要大量的资金。但是，具有突破性的生物技术治疗所带来的回报也是颇为可观的。最近，清洁技术公司已经干成了一件近乎不可能的事情，那就是：为萧条的美国首次公开募股（IPO）市场注入了活力，其证据就是特斯拉公司（Tesla）的股票上市首日的大幅飙升。“特斯拉公司是本行业的领头羊，人们对这类替代能源技术很感兴趣。”设在加利福尼亚州门罗帕克的风险投资机构梅菲尔德公司（Mayfield）的常务董事罗宾瓦杉（Robin Vasan）谈到，该公司已投资了三家能源技术企业。与此同时，位于纽约的格林洛克资本公司（Glenrock Capital Advisors）的风险投资顾问安东尼霍伯曼（

48、Anthony Hoberman）指出，包括无线通信、Facebook等社交媒体平台以及企业和消费者云技术服务等几个技术趋势的兴起，正在创造“一个能让风险投资家如鱼得水的环境。”他还认为，“投资于小公司的风险投资机构，以其灵活性取代了规模更大、资金更为充裕的大型风险投资公司。灵活性是风险投资机构可以有效利用的优势。而在变化缓慢以及变化可预期的时期，灵活性就没有什么优势可言了。”专注于软件投资的瓦杉对此表示赞同。社交媒体、智能手机、平板电脑应用软件以及基于网络的企业软件产品和消费者软件产品的增长，“很可能将是个会持续5年到10年的趋势。”他谈到。“去年，赌注已经投到了这些领域，明年或后年，还会有

49、更多的赌注押宝这些领域的。”调整期望值不过，发掘那些有趣，有发展潜力、能带来不错回报的公司，与那些能给投资人带来数倍投资回报的公司并不是同一件事。传统观念认为，在风险投资组合中，有一半公司最终会倒闭，少数可以带来相当不错的投资回报，只有一两家公司取得的巨大成功足以实现预期的盈利目标。然而，如果没有强劲的首次公开募股市场，这种大赚其钱的机会就会少之又少。过去几年来，得到风险投资支持的大部分公司都被收购了。与IPO不同的是，购并交易所能带来的收益是有限的。因为有如此多的科技企业在寻求买主，所以，谷歌、亚马逊（Amazon）、雅虎、微软以及强生（Johnson & Johnson）等大小通吃的买家可以压低收购价格。总而言之，风险投资机构紧抓不放的退出机制，哪怕是通过公开市场的退出机制，给它们带来的收益有时也不足以弥补损失和费用。“要想让收益超过损失，你就不能