02/25/2009
Venture Financing Report—2008 Year in Review
Readers of Cooley's Venture Financing reports are accustomed to our six quarter study and format. In light of the recent market turmoil, we thought it would be useful to compare 2008 as a whole with prior years. As we reviewed our data, however, 2008 seemed to track recent history more than we anticipated, until we looked at the data in two groups, with the first three quarters of 2008 in one group and the fourth quarter in the other group. Once we filtered the data into these two groups, we quickly identified an unsurprising trend—the first three quarters of 2008 appeared similar to the preceding several years, whereas the fourth quarter of 2008 showed a marked deterioration of certain financial and non-financial terms for startup companies.
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