Connie Loizos

The NVCA and many VCs have complained for years about the IPO market. This year, when just seven venture-backed issuers have gone out, there's plenty of reason to feel disillusioned. But even in 2006, the best year for venture-backed IPOs since the bubble's burst, complaints were commonplace: the IPO market is hamstrung because of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, growing international competition for stock listings has made it tougher to pull off IPOs in the United States, etc., etc. Those claims are disputable. Less disputable is that VCs haven't been helping to create the Apples, the Googles -- companies with game-changing market capitalizations -- they once did. The numbers tell the story: of the most recent 100 venture-backed IPOs, a full 70 percent of them are under water, and 10 of them are trading 70 percent below their offering prices. That's not good for VCs, or anyone else. The full spreadsheet of issuers, IPO dates and where their stocks stood as of the end of yesterday, are right here. Take a look, and let us know what your take is.

Steven Fletcher, a San Francisco-based managing director at the boutique investment bank GCA Savvian, talks with peHUB about what Wall Street’s meltdown means to smaller banks like his own.

It's hard to believe, but some of the richest VCs in California -- power-broker billionaires -- didn't make Forbes's 400 list of the richest people in the United States.

Fluidigm -- a South San Francisco-based biotech firm whose IPO plans coincided, not so nicely, with the blow-up on Wall Street nearly two weeks ago -- has finally withdrawn its registration statement after several postponements. In a release today, the company said that it will "wait for markets to stabilize." I hope for their sake and everyone else's that that wait isn't as long as it's looking right now.

In the October issue of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, I’ve written a feature story about entrepreneur Halsey Minor, who is as reviled as he is admired in Silicon Valley. I think it’s worth a read — not because of my writing but because of Minor, who’s truly a fascinating character, one who I could as easily see […]

With Washington bickering over a bailout package, the largest bank seizure in history, and general unease in the country about what comes next, I wondered how online advertising -- on which so many Valley companies are now depending -- might be impacted. For more insight, I phoned John Durham, formerly head of business development for marketing powerhouse Carat North America and today cofounder of Catalyst:SF, a consultancy brought into startups through their venture capital backers, including Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Battery Ventures. Read our Q&A after the jump...

Congratulations to Mayfield Fund, which has just pulled off a rare feat, closing a $395 million fund in the middle of what most economists would argue is a full-blown recession. Worth noting is that the fund, Mayfield’s thirteenth, welcomed back some of its previous LPs. But it also attracted new investors. I think some “fun […]

Wall Street is melting down. What better time to bring to Broadway the story of a psychopathic Wall Street banker who is fixated on the worldly possessions of his acquaintances, and who expresses his frustrations by embarking on a long and brutal murdering spree? That’s right, “American Psycho,” Bret Easton Ellis’s best-selling novel, is coming to the stage, thanks to three production companies that bought the rights to adapt the story soon after it was made into a graphic, twistedly funny film starring Christian Bale eight years ago.

Last week, Paul Deninger, the vice chairman of the investment bank Jefferies & Co., flew from Boston to Silicon Valley to present his views to NVCA board members who are trying to understand why, exactly, the tech IPO market is so crummy. Deninger pointed a scolding finger at them -- then gave them an earful.

When the investment banking world abruptly burst at the seams last week, one question raised was: What about financial services startups that have been selling into big firms like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers? That query begged another: What about the venture capital firms that specialize in funding financial services startups? Apparently the answer for both is that danger plus crisis could equal opportunity.