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The rocket-ship story of cyber security company Wiz is the kind of thing that the venture capital industry has long relied on to draw in investors.
网络安全公司Wiz的“火箭飞船”故事，正是风险投资行业长期以来吸引投资者的法宝。
Four young engineers sell their first start-up to a giant tech company (Microsoft) and go off to found another. This one finds an unmet need and hits the big time: it quickly raises $1.9bn from some of the best-known names in venture investing. After just four years, a different giant tech company (Google) comes along and offers to buy it for $23bn.
四名年轻工程师将他们的第一家初创公司卖给了一家科技巨头出现了，并提出以230亿美元的价格收购它。
If the sale goes through, it will be the kind of payday that enters VC mythology. But of late, big hits such as this have been few and far between.
如果这次交易成功，将成为风险投资界传奇的一笔巨额收益。但近来，类似这样的大成功案例已经变得越来越少。
The result, for start-up investors, has been a big overhang of ageing — and unsold — private tech companies. Unicorns — private tech concerns valued at $1bn or more — once earned that name because of their rarity. But there are now more than 1,200 of them around the world, according to CB Insights.
对于初创企业投资者来说，结果是大量老化且未售出的私人科技公司。独角兽——估值达到10亿美元或更高的私人科技公司——曾因其稀有性而得名。但根据CB Insights的数据，全球现在已经有超过1200家独角兽公司。
Until they cash in a lot more of those unrealised capital gains, many venture capital firms will find it hard to show the kind of strong cash returns needed to persuade their backers to put up fresh capital. That could well turn the unicorn logjam into a structural obstacle hampering the flow of new money into the latest wave of start-ups.
在兑现更多未实现的资本收益之前，许多风险投资公司将很难展示出足够的强劲现金回报，以说服其支持者投入新的资本。这可能会使独角兽的僵局转变为一个阻碍新一波初创企业获得资金流动的结构性障碍。
The problem has become more acute as tech stocks have stormed back from their post-Covid slump, but stock market listings and sales to other companies have remained subdued. In the US, there have been only four tech IPOs this year by companies valued at more than $1bn, compared with more than 70 in all of 2021, when the stock market was also hot.
随着科技股从新冠疫情后的低迷中反弹，问题变得更加严重，但股市上市和对其他公司的销售仍然低迷。在美国，今年只有四家估值超过10亿美元的科技公司进行了新股发行，相比之下，2021年全年在股市同样火爆的情况下，有超过70家公司进行了新股发行。
Big acquisitions have also become scarce. As a result, billion-dollar “exits” by US tech start-ups number only 16 so far this year, compared with 211 in all of 2021, according to Crunchbase.
大型收购变得稀少。据Crunchbase数据，今年迄今为止，美国科技初创公司实现十亿美元级别的“退出”仅有16起，相比之下，2021年全年有211起。
The VC world is split on whether this is primarily a problem of demand or supply. On the demand side, intense antitrust scrutiny has made it far harder for the richest tech companies to make acquisitions, meaning potential deals like Wiz are rare. Leaving aside Microsoft’s giant Activision purchase, total M&A by the five biggest tech platform companies has averaged a paltry $16bn a year over the past six years.
风险投资界对这主要是需求问题还是供应问题存在分歧。在需求方面，严格的反垄断审查使得最富有的科技公司难以进行收购，这使得像Wiz这样的潜在交易变得罕见。除了微软对动视暴雪(Activision)的巨额收购外，过去六年五大科技平台公司的年均并购总额仅为160亿美元。
Yet even with the richest companies on the sidelines, sectors such as chips and software have been through waves of consolidation in recent years and companies like Broadcom have built tech empires on the back of aggressive acquisition strategies.
然而，即使是最富有的公司也在观望，芯片和软件等行业近年来也经历了一波又一波的整合，而博通等公司则凭借激进的收购策略建立了技术帝国。
When it comes to stock market listings, meanwhile, the drought — interrupted only occasionally by booms like that of 2021 — has been a subject of concern in Silicon Valley for two decades. According to tech investor Coatue, it reflects a structural change in financial markets. As index funds have become a larger part of the overall stock market, according to this argument, there have been fewer active fund managers rewarded for sniffing out promising and undervalued businesses.
与此同时，在股票市场上市方面，硅谷已经关注了20年的干旱问题——这种情况只有在像2021年那样的繁荣时期才会被打断。科技投资公司Coatue表示，这反映了金融市场的结构性变化。根据这种观点，随着指数基金在整个股市中所占的比重越来越大，寻找有前景和被低估的企业的活跃基金经理越来越少。
Others, however, counter that there is more than enough investment appetite, and that the problem has been more a shortage of the right kind of tech company. Lise Buyer, an IPO adviser who worked on Google’s IPO, says managers at many institutions are clamouring for growth tech companies to invest in, since holding the same seven big tech companies as everyone else leaves little room to outperform and justify their fees.
然而，其他人则反驳说，投资热情已经足够，问题更多地是缺乏合适的科技公司。曾参与谷歌IPO的IPO顾问莉斯•拜尔(Lise Buyer)表示，许多机构的管理人员都在争相寻找增长型科技公司进行投资，因为持有与其他人相同的七家大型科技公司几乎没有超越和证明他们的费用的空间。
On the supply side of the tech start-up equation, many of the companies funded during the VC boom were fixated on unprofitable growth. That made sense when private investors demanded growth at all costs, but the stock market now demands a strong profit trajectory — something that takes time to build.
在科技初创企业的供给端，许多在风投热潮期间获得融资的公司都专注于无利可图的增长。当私人投资者不惜一切代价要求增长时，这是合理的，但现在股市要求强劲的利润轨迹——这需要时间来建立。
It is also taking time to work through the overhang from the last funding wave, following a collapse in private market valuations that set in at the end of 2021. Roughly half of the 1,200 start-ups listed by CB Index claimed a valuation of $1-1.5bn at their last funding round, making it likely that many would be better described now as ex-unicorns. Many of those will eventually fold or be sold at break-up prices.
处理上一轮资金浪潮带来的过剩问题也需要时间，这是由于2021年底私人市场估值的崩溃。根据CB Insights(CB Index)列出的1200家初创企业，大约一半在最后一轮融资中的估值为10亿至15亿美元，这意味着许多公司现在更适合被称为前独角兽。这些公司中的许多最终将倒闭或以分拆价格出售。
Meanwhile, with Wall Street offering lower valuations than they once got in the private market, few founders of successful start-ups are eager to bite the bullet and rush to the stock market.
与此同时，由于华尔街给出的估值低于他们曾在私人市场上获得的估值，成功初创企业的创始人很少愿意咬紧牙关急于进入股票市场。
Investors who were eyeing a wave of tech IPOs this year have been forced to rethink. They are now starting to speculate over what might be in store for 2025. One of these years, they might actually be right.
原本关注今年科技公司的新股发行浪潮的投资者不得不重新思考。他们现在开始推测2025年可能会有什么情况。或许在某一年，他们的猜测会成真。