Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Are web startups finally paying attention to the economy?

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com and oft-cited and followed technology pundit, just emailed out to his email list an email titled “(The) Startup Depression.” Calacanis says:

It’s my believe that the economic downturn will be much worse than it is today, and that 50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months.

Make a list of every Web 2.0 startup to raise an A or B round and cross 80% of them off the list, because they will not make it to their next round of funding or profitability.

Update: Willan Johnson (COO at SocialVibe, former VP at Yahoo) has a good perspective on this here.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 5:16 am and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.