Tech stock correction? This has all happened before

In the last two weeks there’s been a flurry of articles about the implications of a 25 percent decline in the public market value of a bunch of Internet stocks. They range from “the sky is falling” to “the IPO market window is closing” to “there will be more stupid television shows about Silicon Valley” (I prefer Game of Thrones and 24, thank you very much.)

As many of the Cylons from BSG are fond of saying, “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”

1997

I remember a moment in time in 1997. We were in the middle of fundraising for Softbank Venture Capital (which became Mobius Venture Capital.) It was the first VC fund I’d helped raise. We probably had about $150 million committed and were running around trying to get to $300 million for what we had positioned as a dedicated Internet VC fund.

I can’t remember the month, but I think it was in the summer, that all the public Internet stocks dropped a bunch (probably 25 percent). Suddenly every meeting we had turned cold with all of our potential LPs either asking how we were going to make money on the Internet or asserting that there was no way that we’d make money on the Internet.

A few months later the public markets for Internet stocks turned around and we closed a $330 million fund which ended up doing extremely well.

1999

In 1999 we filed an S-1 to take Sage Networks public. I was a co-founder and co-chairman. We were planning to go public in the early spring, but in February we acquired a company called Interliant which doubled our side. We had to grind through a refiling of our S-1 which cost us a month.

We finally hit the road with the intention of going public by the end of April. Our underwriters (Merrill Lynch) told us not to worry that the SEC hadn’t cleared our filing yet — they always did it a few days before you went public. I spent three weeks on a road show with our president and CFO building the book. Day after day passed and we didn’t hear from the SEC.

Two days before we were supposed to price, the book was 10x oversubscribed and our $9 – $11 price looked like it could move up meaningfully.

The day we were supposed to price we still hadn’t heard from the SEC. “Don’t worry,” said the banker at Merrill Lynch, “We’ll get it done.”

The next day, when we were supposed to be trading, a fax came through from the SEC. It was 20 pages long and had about a month’s worth of work to pull together on the F-pages of the filing (we had acquired 20 companies.) That night we all drank a lot of scotch – we knew the IPO wasn’t going to happen that week and we’d just wasted a road show. I remember being completely numb the next day as I flew home from NY to Boulder, not completely understanding how we had just blown the IPO.

A few weeks later Internet stocks started to fall. I vaguely recall that eBay was one of the bellwethers at the time and I think it had a big drop. Suddenly the IPO market window closed. No one was interested in Internet stocks, let alone one that was being tortured by the SEC for accounting disclosure on a bunch of acquisitions of tiny companies.

At the end of June I went to Italy for a week vacation with my wife Amy and my parents. We did a walking trip which I remember being wonderful — 10 miles a day finished off with lots of food and wine in a beautiful Italian countryside. No phones, no email. Until Thursday, when I got a call at the villa we were staying at from one of my board members who said, “you have to come home right now.” I responded with, “I’m flying home Sunday and will be back on Monday.” He said, “No — now. The road show starts again Monday and you have to be at the printer on Saturday to sign off on the filing.”

I scrambled to find a flight home from the middle of Italy, got to NY by Saturday mid-day, re-started the road show on Monday, and we were public by the end of the week. We went out at $10 and traded up to $15.

When I checked the market indexes, they were basically the same as they were two months earlier before things dropped.

2014

Lots of folks are going to pontificate about what is going on in the public markets. Most have an agenda or a vested interest.

If you are an entrepreneur, ignore the pontification and go build your business. Pay attention to the dynamics in the macro, since they will impact you, but don’t get caught up in. Don’t create a narrative to justify something that is going on. Focus on the reality – your reality – and do your best operating in the context in which you can’t control.

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

This story originally appeared on Brad Feld. Copyright 2014