Last month, my friend Nicolas Colin, a Director at The Family, described Europe’s tech IPOs as “boring” in a newsletter. Among other points, Colin argues the need for a deeper ecosystem that links Europe’s entrepreneurs with capital markets. Large IPOs are a big part of this. A debate over the veracity of Colin’s claim spilled into social media, which focused more so on what one considers “boring” than anything else. Word choice aside, I presume that by “boring” Colin meant “small.” On that, he has a point. In both a game of averages and outliers, many of Europe’s most valuable startups have in fact looked to American exchanges for public listings.
Time to Exit
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a new study about women-founded venture-backed companies in the United States. One of the things I looked at is exit rates—the share of companies either being acquired or doing a IPO—by the gender composition of founding teams. A colleague who reviewed a draft of the study challenged me on the eight- and ten-year exit lag from first financing because the time to exit has gone up in recent years. That’s a fair point, but I only have data going back to 2005 (the oldest first-financing cohort in my data), which constrains my ability to look over longer time periods. It is still an important exercise, and most critically, the results of the comparative analysis between women-founded and non-women-founded companies wouldn’t change much by having more data. And, that’s what I’m most after in the report.
But that did get me to thinking: just how much longer is it taking for venture-backed companies to exit?