Who wouldn’t want to be a venture capitalist right now? Investment bankers may be reviled and private equity executives hammered but Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite can do no wrong.
Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, is forced by a public outcry to waive a bonus of less than ￡1m and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs gains little credit for seeing his share bonus nearly halved to $7m. Yet no one minds that Jim Breyer of Accel Partners could gain $500m from Facebook’s initial public offering, alongside the $9bn his firm stands to reap.
Perhaps that’s fair enough. Mr Breyer risked his own money in Facebook in 2005, not knowing how astonishingly successful it would be, and Silicon Valley, although built on government-funded research, is not too big to fail. Venture capital firms are like Wall Street partnerships of a generation ago – their partners can do very well but no one saves them when they go wrong.