A boom, a bust, a reckoning, a race: Four takes on today’s startup market

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today let’s try to figure out where the startup and private markets stand, as there are a few different takes out there that I can’t reconcile. Our efforts to better understand how young companies are faring comes, of course, in the shadow of the impending $7 billion Intuit-Credit Karma deal — the second, multi-billion dollar fintech exit so far in 2020.

So where are we today in the startup business cycle? We’ll summarize a few different perspectives on the question, and then come up with our best synthesis of the group.

If you observe the behavior of the venture class, it’s a full-speed-ahead market. This is contrasted by a summary of recent private-market tech stumbles compiled by New York Times’s Erin Griffith. Bolstering Griffith’s take are a set of long-running complaints by select tech leaders regarding the health of some of the private market’s most valuable companies.

But as Credit Karma looks set to exit at a huge valuation, it’s hard to tease out which perspective is the most correct. So let’s try to answer that for ourselves.