Startups Struggle For Survival As Investors Turn 'Picky' (gerbsmanpartners.com)

An anonymous reader quotes The Wall Street Journal: Eighteen months ago, Beepi Inc. was rapidly expanding its online used-car business to 16 U.S. cities where people could buy cut-rate vehicles adorned with giant shiny bows. Beepi doesn't exist anymore. After burning through more than $120 million in capital, the startup failed to raise more cash and shut down in February. Its roughly 270 employees cleared out of the cavernous Mountain View, California headquarters, leaving behind the ping-pong table and putting green.

Beepi's rapid demise offers a glimpse into the changing fortunes of Silicon Valley startups, many of which have struggled to adjust since a two-year investment frenzy came to an end. In 2014 and 2015, mutual funds, hedge funds and other investors pumped billions into companies that they now see as overvalued, and unlikely to pull off an initial public offering. As venture capitalists became more discerning, investment in U.S. tech startups plummeted by 30% in dollar terms last year from a year earlier.
The article also points out that "much of the money still being invested is pouring into the upper echelon of highly valued start-ups like Airbnb and WeWork or younger ones with clear paths to profit," leaving "scores" of previously well-funded startups now struggling to survive.

Comments

Re:The main problem

[fnj]

More precisely, exactly what were those people doing with ALL THAT LOOT??? Where did it go?

US Capital Reinvestment Problem

[zifn4b]

US Capital Reinvestment is a problem in general. Large corporations and investment firms with $2.5 trillion is in off-shore bank accounts citing that 39.6% corporate tax rate as the reason why they refuse to repatriate the money. We're also still on the tail end of the one of the most abysmal job markets since The Great Depression. Companies and investment firms are still squeezing every last whiplash they can get out of the poor labor market conditions to get more value of existing offerings and employees.

TL;DR there is a lack of incentive for anyone to invest in the US job market and policy makers haven't really done anything to address the problem other than offshoring jobs and hiring H-1B visa's that work twice as hard for half the pay but are also twice as incompetent. Great situation we have in the job market. It's pure insanity.

Re:The main problem

[dgatwood]

Of course, a big part of the problem is that in the 1970s, California enacted a property tax scheme that is perfectly designed to limit homeowners' ability to move. By making property taxes be based solely on the purchase price instead of on the actual value of the home, people would pay dramatically more in property taxes every year if they sell one house and buy a second one even if they break even on the deal.

Prop 13 drastically skews the proportion of renters to owners by forcing people to rent out their old place so they can afford the rent on a new place instead of selling and buying. It also discourages new people from entering the market by making them pay the bulk of the cost of goods and services while folks who have been there for a few years pay proportionally less. The result is one of the most screwed up real estate markets anywhere in the world.

(BTW, Sunnyvale mobile home parks are only ~$1k per month and only maybe $50–75k to buy an old house and move it out of the way, plus the cost of whatever you move in. That extra $1,500 per month + $75k is the Google tax you pay for living five minutes closer to work.)

Another part of the problem is that the Bay Area lacks a proper region-wide planning commission with authority to regulate zoning across the various cities. So you have places like Menlo Park, where the only housing is private estates for the rich C*Os, with lots of businesses out near the shore where land is cheap (because it smells of rotting fish), and you have Gilroy and Morgan Hill that are almost entirely housing, with few businesses.

IMO, what we really need is to have some government entity that slowly converts business-use land in the South Bay to residential use and says "No" whenever big companies say that they want to expand their presence in the South Bay, encouraging them to build satellite offices farther south instead. And offer tax incentives to locate new businesses outside the SF/Peninsula/South Bay area. Adding more businesses farther south would increase the reverse commute traffic and reduce the primary commute proportionally, and opening up more farmland to development would go a long way towards reducing the cost of housing as well.

Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen unless there's a single management agency that has some authority across all the different administrative districts. Right now, each city wants to get its share of the tax revenue from new businesses, and they mostly don't care about the clustering problems that result from it. Nobody is taking a bird's eye view of the problem, or if they are, they don't have the authority to do anything about it.