By Patrick Clark 11/09/12 3:17pm

buyers and sellers

second market sellers

Liquid Incentive! More Startup Employees Sell Shares Through SecondMarket

Is it a second act for SecondMarket? That might be overstating the case, but the private market’s third-quarter report revealed that a growing portion of the sellers on its platform are current employees putting up shares in their own startups.

“More and more companies are using SecondMarket as an incentive tool,” Aishwarya Iyer, public affairs manager for SecondMarket, told Betabeat. “We have CEOs who are telling their employees, ‘We’re doing this for you.’”

Seventy-six percent of the sellers in the private stock market were current employees, up from 60 percent in the second quarter, SecondMarket said in a release, and a dramatic reversal from previous years: former employees made up 90 percent of sellers in 2010 and 2011. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/03/11 1:39pm

IP Uh Oh

startupwinter

Venture-Backed IPOs Are Already Feeling That Startup Winter

The latest numbers don’t bode well for those long suffering VCs hoping for an IPO exit. According to a poll from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, venture-backed IPO exits are at the weakest point, dollar wise, since the fourth quarter of 2009. In the third quarter of this year, only five such companies went public, down 77 percent from Q2 and 64 percent year over year.

That might be why New York magazine’s lengthy Twitter profile reported, “The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here.”

But the bubble does come with another pressure valve. Read More