Could be wrong, but I believe investors and startup people are in what you call a deployment period. We are searching out new ways to finance.
This blog post was written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager and Social Strategist of the Microsoft BizSpark program.
We are mistakenly using the junk heap of the past to convince ourselves of the next version of the future we want to see in investment. Big problem. If our assumptions come from a past that led to this mistake, we are utilizing a perception that leads to nowhere.
When you read blog posts that say there is a crunch going on, or we need fewer entrepreneurs, these are the three things I believe we are witnessing:
1. Perception confusion: believing there is of lack of money for investment (evidence to the contrary) when really technology created by the previous wave of disruption has created a kind of entrepreneur who needs to be funded in a different way for different ideas.
There is a lag between money that has already gone into experiments to fund these ideas and the result, which will then lead to a new bubble in due course.
2. Failure to realize this money is being deployed by people other than traditional players in the Silicon Valley / investment game.
3. A preference for wanting to see more of the old behavior to prove that we are ready for a new cycle of investment. These people will be caught off foot.
Summary: I don’t think tech bloggers are wrong for noting a crunch or a lack of investment opportunities. I just think that a fundamental change has happened, but that it doesn’t mean no more opportunities remain. I just think the opportunities look different, and they don’t act like our previous dollar assumptions behave.
I’ve always believed that we are lag animals. We look out into the world with knowledge gained from past behavior. but the future only looks like the past when you use the past to see it.