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The rocket-ship story of cyber security company Wiz is the kind of thing that the venture capital industry has long relied on to draw in investors.
網路安全公司Wiz的「火箭太空船」故事，正是風險投資行業長期以來吸引投資者的法寶。
Four young engineers sell their first start-up to a giant tech company (Microsoft) and go off to found another. This one finds an unmet need and hits the big time: it quickly raises $1.9bn from some of the best-known names in venture investing. After just four years, a different giant tech company (Google) comes along and offers to buy it for $23bn.
四名年輕工程師將他們的第一家新創公司賣給了一家科技巨擘出現了，並提出以230億美元的價格收購它。
If the sale goes through, it will be the kind of payday that enters VC mythology. But of late, big hits such as this have been few and far between.
如果這次交易成功，將成爲風險投資界傳奇的一筆鉅額收益。但近來，類似這樣的大成功案例已經變得越來越少。
The result, for start-up investors, has been a big overhang of ageing — and unsold — private tech companies. Unicorns — private tech concerns valued at $1bn or more — once earned that name because of their rarity. But there are now more than 1,200 of them around the world, according to CB Insights.
對於新創企業投資者來說，結果是大量老化且未售出的私人科技公司。獨角獸——估值達到10億美元或更高的私人科技公司——曾因其稀有性而得名。但根據CB Insights的數據，全球現在已經有超過1200家獨角獸公司。
Until they cash in a lot more of those unrealised capital gains, many venture capital firms will find it hard to show the kind of strong cash returns needed to persuade their backers to put up fresh capital. That could well turn the unicorn logjam into a structural obstacle hampering the flow of new money into the latest wave of start-ups.
在兌現更多未實現的資本收益之前，許多風險投資公司將很難展示出足夠的強勁現金回報，以說服其支持者投入新的資本。這可能會使獨角獸的僵局轉變爲一個阻礙新一波新創企業獲得資金流動的結構性障礙。
The problem has become more acute as tech stocks have stormed back from their post-Covid slump, but stock market listings and sales to other companies have remained subdued. In the US, there have been only four tech IPOs this year by companies valued at more than $1bn, compared with more than 70 in all of 2021, when the stock market was also hot.
隨著科技股從新冠疫情後的低迷中反彈，問題變得更加嚴重，但股市上市和對其他公司的銷售仍然低迷。在美國，今年只有四家估值超過10億美元的科技公司進行了新股發行，相比之下，2021年全年在股市同樣火爆的情況下，有超過70家公司進行了新股發行。
Big acquisitions have also become scarce. As a result, billion-dollar “exits” by US tech start-ups number only 16 so far this year, compared with 211 in all of 2021, according to Crunchbase.
大型收購變得稀少。據Crunchbase數據，今年迄今爲止，美國科技新創公司實現十億美元級別的「退出」僅有16起，相比之下，2021年全年有211起。
The VC world is split on whether this is primarily a problem of demand or supply. On the demand side, intense antitrust scrutiny has made it far harder for the richest tech companies to make acquisitions, meaning potential deals like Wiz are rare. Leaving aside Microsoft’s giant Activision purchase, total M&A by the five biggest tech platform companies has averaged a paltry $16bn a year over the past six years.
風險投資界對這主要是需求問題還是供應問題存在分歧。在需求方面，嚴格的反壟斷審查使得最富有的科技公司難以進行收購，這使得像Wiz這樣的潛在交易變得罕見。除了微軟對動視暴雪(Activision)的鉅額收購外，過去六年五大科技平臺公司的年均併購總額僅爲160億美元。
Yet even with the richest companies on the sidelines, sectors such as chips and software have been through waves of consolidation in recent years and companies like Broadcom have built tech empires on the back of aggressive acquisition strategies.
然而，即使是最富有的公司也在觀望，晶片和軟體等行業近年來也經歷了一波又一波的整合，而博通等公司則憑藉激進的收購策略建立了技術帝國。
When it comes to stock market listings, meanwhile, the drought — interrupted only occasionally by booms like that of 2021 — has been a subject of concern in Silicon Valley for two decades. According to tech investor Coatue, it reflects a structural change in financial markets. As index funds have become a larger part of the overall stock market, according to this argument, there have been fewer active fund managers rewarded for sniffing out promising and undervalued businesses.
與此同時，在股票市場上市方面，矽谷已經關注了20年的乾旱問題——這種情況只有在像2021年那樣的繁榮時期纔會被打斷。科技投資公司Coatue表示，這反映了金融市場的結構性變化。根據這種觀點，隨著指數基金在整個股市中所佔的比重越來越大，尋找有前景和被低估的企業的活躍基金經理越來越少。
Others, however, counter that there is more than enough investment appetite, and that the problem has been more a shortage of the right kind of tech company. Lise Buyer, an IPO adviser who worked on Google’s IPO, says managers at many institutions are clamouring for growth tech companies to invest in, since holding the same seven big tech companies as everyone else leaves little room to outperform and justify their fees.
然而，其他人則反駁說，投資熱情已經足夠，問題更多地是缺乏合適的科技公司。曾參與谷歌IPO的IPO顧問莉斯•拜爾(Lise Buyer)表示，許多機構的管理人員都在爭相尋找成長型科技公司進行投資，因爲持有與其他人相同的七家大型科技公司幾乎沒有超越和證明他們的費用的空間。
On the supply side of the tech start-up equation, many of the companies funded during the VC boom were fixated on unprofitable growth. That made sense when private investors demanded growth at all costs, but the stock market now demands a strong profit trajectory — something that takes time to build.
在科技新創企業的供給端，許多在創投熱潮期間獲得融資的公司都專注於無利可圖的成長。當私人投資者不惜一切代價要求成長時，這是合理的，但現在股市要求強勁的利潤軌跡——這需要時間來建立。
It is also taking time to work through the overhang from the last funding wave, following a collapse in private market valuations that set in at the end of 2021. Roughly half of the 1,200 start-ups listed by CB Index claimed a valuation of $1-1.5bn at their last funding round, making it likely that many would be better described now as ex-unicorns. Many of those will eventually fold or be sold at break-up prices.
處理上一輪資金浪潮帶來的過剩問題也需要時間，這是由於2021年底私人市場估值的崩潰。根據CB Insights(CB Index)列出的1200家新創企業，大約一半在最後一輪融資中的估值爲10億至15億美元，這意味著許多公司現在更適合被稱爲前獨角獸。這些公司中的許多最終將倒閉或以分拆價格出售。
Meanwhile, with Wall Street offering lower valuations than they once got in the private market, few founders of successful start-ups are eager to bite the bullet and rush to the stock market.
與此同時，由於華爾街給出的估值低於他們曾在私人市場上獲得的估值，成功新創企業的創辦人很少願意咬緊牙關急於進入股票市場。
Investors who were eyeing a wave of tech IPOs this year have been forced to rethink. They are now starting to speculate over what might be in store for 2025. One of these years, they might actually be right.
原本關注今年科技公司的新股發行浪潮的投資者不得不重新思考。他們現在開始推測2025年可能會有什麼情況。或許在某一年，他們的猜測會成真。
richard.waters@ft.com
richard.waters@ft.com