{"id":24158,"date":"2014-03-25T14:39:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T13:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=24158"},"modified":"2019-05-02T17:48:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T15:48:02","slug":"rudevc-theres-party-goin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2014\/03\/rudevc-theres-party-goin\/","title":{"rendered":"RudeVC: There’s a party goin’ on [not] here"},"content":{"rendered":"

.\"megadeals_ao\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

There’s a party goin’ on right here<\/em>
\nA celebration to last throughout the years<\/em>
\nSo bring your good times, and your laughter too<\/em>
\nWe gonna celebrate your party with you<\/em><\/p>\n

Kool & The Gang probably did not have the stock market in mind when their hit song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 exactly 33 years ago last month. But apparently, Celebration is booming on trading floors and conference rooms in many of the world’s financial hubs.<\/p>\n

Last month I wrote about<\/a> the eerie similarities between 2013 and 1998 (record-breaking venture financings, slow growth in the emerging economy, loose credit). The implication, if history follows a pattern, is that 2014 may come to resemble 1999.<\/p>\n

Evidently, we’re in a period of financial celebration in the tech sector. Whether the word ‘bubble’ is the appropriate term is a debate for the experts, but it’s certainly not a normal valuation environment. M&A activity is heating up, both in quantity and in eye-popping headlines (doesn’t the acquisition of Instagram seem whimsical compared to WhatsApp now?).<\/p>\n

Euphoria appears to be returning to tech IPOs too. Just the other day, AO World<\/a> went public on London’s AIM stock exchange. AO World, which stands for Appliances Online and was founded on the back of a pub dare, is an online retailer that — surprise — sells applicances online. It’s basically the UK’s version of Darty.com. Nothing ground-breakingly innovative, but the company undoubtedly excels in its operational execution. The eye-popping part is AO’s meteoric rise<\/a> in its stock price on IPO day, soaring 44% up to nearly \u00a31.7 billion in valuation. In fiscal 2013, AO generated<\/a> 8.95M\u00a3 of Ebit on 275M\u00a3 of total turnover, so the AIM valued AO at a whopping 190 times trailing EBIT.<\/p>\n

Has FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) come to stand for France Often Missing Out ?<\/h4>\n

If today’s celebratory financial climate is news to you, you are not alone. Many of my professional contacts working in France’s financial sector reacted with astonishment when I recounted the story of AO World’s IPO.<\/p>\n

No, we have other topics on our mind here these days, like the municipal elections, the government’s meddling<\/a> in the sale of SFR<\/a>, and the confusion<\/a> surrounding the launch of the PEA-PME (the panacea meant to cure the capital scarcity for French SMEs which is rapidly becoming a political imbroglio). Meanwhile, while software is bringing disruption to every sector of the economy, funding for the ambitious French sovereign cloud endeavor is doled out to consortiums of incumbents<\/a> rather than to agile startups, as Tariq Krim reminded us in his scathing piece<\/a> in Le Point last week.<\/p>\n

To borrow from Fred Wilson’s insightful musings<\/a> on the tech bubble question, this year may well be a great time to be in the VC and startup business globally. I just hope France gets invited to the party before it’s over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

. There’s a party goin’ on right here A celebration to last throughout the years So bring your good times, and your laughter too We gonna celebrate your party with you Kool & The Gang probably did not have the stock market in mind when their hit song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":24159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[8772],"class_list":["post-24158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance","tag-alternext-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}