Can Private Stock Markets Save Silicon Valley?

The ongoing drought in financial exits is a huge drag on Silicon Valley. Even if entrepreneurs manage to build a company, they and their investors have a hard time getting any money out of it. Opportunities for going public currently range from rare to nonexistent. The other main route to financial liquidity, acquisition, is also not reliable enough to count on.

 Such conditions make it hard to build a company in the first place. Investors hesitate to fund it, and potential employees hesitate to leave more-secure jobs to take a chance on a startup. But some participants in a panel at the recent AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford argued that secondary markets provide an answer. Such markets in essence function as private stock markets as an alternative to public ones.