Our friend John Gabbert of Pitchbook offered us some market analysis in our March webinar. His company tracks private equity data, transactions, etc., and was able to give us an excellent state of the market update.
Excitingly, while PE investment took a hit during the last decade due to the bubble bursting, these statistics are not reflected in investments in tech, especially software and IT which took a drop, but which has remained steady over the last three years, which is very encouraging.
For me the most interesting point John made, however, was the fact that in current private equity portfolios there are more than 500 companies, 270 of which are more than 5 years old! In terms of investment, that makes them practically ancient, and it means we can look for a lot of them to be cut loose to generate liquidity in the next year or so. Fire sales? Or just consistent releases of tech companies into the marketplace? It'll be interesting to see.