The good times are over again

But your startup doesn't have to die.

VCs are stupid. To repurpose the old adage: If you can, you do. If you can’t (but got lucky once) you become a VC. This is true of nearly every VC in the world. Do you think any of them are still coding? Are still aware of the state of the art? Absolutely not. They look for deals that their friends are in and pile on like Beanie Baby collectors, driving up valuations on the latest hotness and dumping their previous investments like a kid dropping a toy at the beach to pick up a shiny rock.

But, because VCs are stupid (and I count myself as an angel investor so yeah, I’m stupid, too) they run in packs. And right now, as in 2008 and 2014, those packs have pulled back to lick their wounds. Startups are failing at “record rates” and VCs are reporting zombie companies that are shambolically traversing the landscape, dropping parts as they go.

From Fortune:

[A VC] told me they see this as a perfect storm of zombie companies that raised too much money at unrealistic valuations in recent years—and found themselves stuck with business models that don’t make sense anymore in this tougher environment. “I think a lot of active board members are basically having honest conversations with founders and saying, ‘Hey, even if you really execute over the next three years, you’re just gonna get back to, like, half the valuation you’re at today…and even then it might be difficult to raise,’” they told me. The VC said they’ve noticed these asset sales more in the past two months.

Here’s a little advice for folks going through it right now.