Thanks to the capitalist stock mania sweeping the Communist mainland, Chinese private and state-owned companies issuing stock for the first time are becoming the most valuable companies in the world — at least on paper — often overnight.
To have a capitalist stock market being played like a casino by tens of millions of freebooting speculators right in the middle of a society still purporting to be socialist and run by a communist party with a deep affinity for rigid, Leninist, interventionist controls speaks to the contradictory nature of the modern Chinese dilemma.
Now that the gold-rush mentality has started to fade, and it is apparent that not every company with a dot-com in its name will strike the mother lode, serious players -- venture capitalists, stock analysts, company executives -- are beginning to evaluate survivability in a more systematic manner.
Adam Harper of Dummy called it a "pastiche [of] a kind of music you never knew you knew existed: techno-capitalist stock promotional music for the era of the personal computer.
One of his boldest experiments began in the late 1980s, when, like a mad scientist playing with the creation of new hybrid species, he called for the creation of two capitalist-style stock exchanges in China.
During the past decade, soaring enthusiasm for clean tech in 2006 '07 and social media in 2010 '12 each time abruptly subsided, leaving the portfolios of venture capitalists, and stock investors, in shambles.
If the market fell further and looked as if it was not going to bounce back, the voluminous investments by venture capitalists and public stock investors in small technology companies would slow, bankers and investors say.
Throughout the day, the lawyers field questions from a roster of start-up clients looking to execute routine legal tasks, like fundraising from venture capitalists and issuing stock options to employees.
Today banks, venture capitalists, underwriters and stock brokers in the U.S. don't much care who your grandfather was or whether you went to a prep school or dropped out of college.
Venture capitalists buy preferred stock which has additional rights and privileges attached to it (particularly a liquidity preference, which lets those venture capitalists get their money back before the common shareholders get their share).
Most angels and venture capitalists demand preferred stock for their investment, which gives them more control over the company and the ability to take their money plus a guaranteed return off the table in the event of a sale or IPO.
