With the downturn in the unicorn market, founders have lost much of their power with investors. “New unicorns are plummeting. Here’s how volatile markets and shrinking valuations are shifting power from founders to investors, CB Insights reported, and venture funding to startups is ebbing.

Even those certain funds and investors who had ridden to rock star status in the last decade plus with those outsized returns are being scrutinized more closely, especially by the tech press. While new funds are still being raised, existing funds raising follow on funds and investors are still writing checks – albeit more cautiously these days, Adam Newmann and A16z’s investment into Flow aside –  if it’s not full-on investor winter in many quarters, we’re certainly getting close.

 

Welcome back to 2004

And the mid ‘90s, when times were tough for founders, investors leery of the new technology, but with outsized acquisitions announced almost daily in the late 90s, the investor dollars were flowing – seemingly to anything that had a dot com in its name.

When the tech bubble burst at the turn of the century, the sentiment of the day was that tech had been a lark and thanks for playing. It was dark times, but tech didn’t really disappear. It had gone somewhat underground as founders developed the new techs that would rise from ashes of the meltdown.

Enter the next iteration – the Age of Big Platforms and Social – both of which were about walled gardens – which was anathema to the premise on which the web itself was founded – hockey stick growth and more, more, more.

Even a hockey stick tops off somewhere. Especially when abuse of power – censorship, deplatforming, etc, – enter the equation.

Whose web is this anyway?

We will remind you that the best companies – and the truly innovative ideas – come during down markets and in a few years, we will see the rise of the next iteration of tech.

But probably not a lot of unicorns in the meantime.

Speaking of bye bye mon unicorn and earlier century innovation, this just in: Mark Zuckerberg lost more than half his wealth this year: Mark Zuckerberg’s $71 Billion Wealth Wipeout Puts Focus on Meta’s Woes “Even in a rough year for tech billionaires everywhere, the Meta CEO’s losses stand out,” Bloomberg reported.

 

The title – Bye Bye Mon Unicorn, is a reference to a Mitsou song, Bye Bye Mon Cowboy – “Bye bye my cowboy, bye bye my rodeo. It’s so hard to fall so low when you’ve been so high.”

And ain’t it the truth and to us, a fitting description of the Web 2 era, although for now, it’s bye bye mon unicorn. At least for the next few years.

But take heart. Bootstrap as long as possible. And try to think outside of the black box that Big Tech has become these past few years.  Even the public is sick of the hype. And of being tracked ad nauseam. Pay attention to that as well, founders and investors out there, and to the arc of tech – that some of the best companies are developed in times like these. Sometimes what looks at first blush like the worst of times may well, in the long run, lead to the best of times. It may take a few years, but the next iteration of tech will arrive, and needs to be nurtured in the interim.

Trust us: after all, this is not our first rodeo.

Onward and forward.