A roomful of audience members in UCSB’s Corwin Pavillion held up their hands when venture capitalist Keval Desai asked how many of them were hoping to fund new companies within the next year even though Randy Churchill of Pricewaterhouse Coopers told them that 16 venture deals — far less than the number of raised hands — had been signed in the tri-counties so far this year.
Still, hope sprang eternal at a recent event cohosted by the MIT Central Coast Enterprise Forum and UCSB’s Technology Management Program called the “Raising Venture Capital: Some of the Important Rules Have Changed.”
And the news from presenters was not all doom and gloom. Despite high unemployment and uncertainty creating an environment in which deal terms tend to favor investors rather than entrepreneurs, those market conditions mean that venture capitalists are on the prowl.