The Wall Street Journal recently asked a highly poignant question: “Who’s going to fund the next Steve Jobs?” The Journal asks the question in light of a startling piece of trivia: The second quarter of 2008 marked the first time in 30 years that no venture-backed companies went public. Not a single one.
Why? Through punitive regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, we may have dried up the appetite for public exits, given that a private buyer means less red tape:
This is bad news for the U.S. economy. Does anyone think that we would be superior off if Bill Gates and Michael Dell had sold out to corporate behemoths early in their careers, instead of leading their firms for years as public companies? Would consumers enjoy the same vibrant market in Web services if Yahoo had gobbled up a nascent Google? How powerful would our computers be if Intel had become an IBM subsidiary, instead of going public in 1971?…
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