📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing

“It is because the people that traffic in these stocks are the same ones that fund these early stage biotech companies. And I talked to a bunch of them, and they're like, if these guys block this kind of deal, we're going to get out of this game entirely. So just from the horse's mouth, what I'm telling you is you're going to see a pall come over the early stage venture financing landscape because a lot of these guys that are crossover investors, that own a lot of these public biotech stocks, that also fund the private stocks, will change their risk posture if they can't make money.”

“Look, it is hard enough to make money as either a pharma investor or as a VC that there's only two good outcomes, right? There's IPOs, there's M&A, everything else basically goes, everything else is a zero, it goes bankrupt. So if you take M&A off the table, you really suppress the already challenged returns of venture capital.”

“Yeah, but Chamath, we're just not seeing a lot of the younger stuff get blocked. I don't think we've seen any attempts at blocking speculative portfolio acquisitions or speculative company acquisitions.”

“There's so few ways to have a good exit in the tech industry that when you take away M&A, it puts a damper on all risk-taking and the deployment of risk capital into the ecosystem.”

“there is no viable M&A path for early stage venture capital businesses. So if you can't have a 20 billion dollar merger or a 40 billion dollar merger or a 15 or 20 billion dollar M&A with a high degree of confidence, then the path to liquidity through M&A is less than 20% of the outcomes”

“the fact that regulators took 15 months to analyze the deal only to come to the conclusion that they basically weren't going to allow it, and then Adobe finally killed it, is going to have a chilling effect on M&A and Silicon Valley ... when you take half the potential exits off the table, you're absolutely making it tougher for VCs and founders to get a good return. It's that simple.”

“I don't know if I'd take the antitrust regime as being the core driver of M&A not being on the table. ... The biggest driver of concern is just all the return on capital metrics that the big buyers are having to face. Return on invested capital is becoming more important than it's ever been”

“One is if we put in more conservative, Republican, Libertarian, etc., less regulatory regime in Washington that could open up M&A as soon as 2025, perhaps.”