Reports from the AlwaysOn Venture Summit held at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Half Moon Bay in Silicon Valley this past week revealed a few reasons for optimism amid the overwhelmingly gloomy economic picture.
True, most start-ups are hunkering down, conserving capital and trying to innovate their way out of this crisis. Experts at the conference differed as to how long the slump will last, ranging from a recovery in late 2009 to a prolonged stretch of hard times lasting three or four years, according to Venturebeat, which covered the conference.
But on the brighter side, liquidity has been returning to credit markets. And while IPOs were down 94 percent in 2008, there are still many companies that are filing registrations for going public and waiting for the market to pick up. This suggests that many healthy private companies could be waiting to go public in 2009 or 2010.
In addition, big corporate venture investors such as Microsoft, Google and IBM have been buying up or investing in companies, and say they will continue to do so. Cleantech continues to be bright spot for investments, though conference experts predicted the sector is likely to catch fire in emerging markets first, which are building new infrastructure from scratch, and therefore more likely to invest in newer, greener technologies. And don’t count out the effect that possible new stimulus packages from the incoming Obama administration will have on cleantech research and start-ups.
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