Well, if you were hoping that Google Ventures would give you $500,000 to develop your new app, you can stop hoping. The company has decided to move away from offering seed-stage capital to startups.
Bill Maris, CEO of Google Ventures told The Wallstreet Journal about Google Ventures’s plans to focus on more mature companies.
“We moved away from seed-stage investing,” Mr. Maris said. “I think there’s less opportunity here,”
Maris went on to add that he feels the market is overheated. He also voiced his concern of the trend of many startups resisting IPO. “I’m seeing actual companies that are, for reasons that are hard for me to understand, resisting to go public with all they’ve got,” Mr. Maris said.
Founder of Digg, Kevin Rose who worked for Google Ventures decided to leave the company in order to focus on his startup North Technologies. Rose has since merged his company with Hodinkee which was a well known mechanical watch blog. This was key since Rose focused on early and seed stage deals.
The move by Google Ventures is seen by some as validation of the belief that some investors hold that we are in a tech bubble. Similar to the “dot-com bubble” the markets experienced in the early 2000’s. Many investors and those in the technology sector have voiced concerns of the quality of startups in the past several years.
Including New York based engineer Lawrence Finn. After a recent visit to Silicon Valley, Finn voiced his opinion about San Francisco. “I believe that San Francisco is in a financial and social bubble separate from the real world”, Finn posted on his blog.
He went on to say:
“It feels to me that VCs and angel investors are pumping money into SF. This money helps fund many tiny crappy startups.”
It is hard to say if anyone at Google would agree with Finn, but it does appear that Google Ventures wants to focus on larger and possibly better deals.
You can read more here:
