Price fixing in silicon valley?

Doing over start ups? Raping the US tech sector to get a quick buck? surely not. But that seems to be the gist of a piece done by Techcrunch here. 


Here are some snippets

This group of investors, which together account for nearly 100% of early stage startup deals in Silicon Valley, have been meeting regularly to compare notes. Early on it was mostly to complain about a variety of things. But the conversation has evolved to the point where these super angels are actually colluding (and I don’t use that word lightly) to solve a number of problems, say multiple sources who are part of the group and were at the dinner. According to these souces, the ongoing agenda includes:

• Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals

• Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations

• How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely

• How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.

• More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal).

• One source has also said that there is a wiki of some sort that the group has that explicitly talks about how the group should act as one to keep deal valuations down.

At least two people attending were extremely uneasy about the meetings, and have said that they are only there to gather information, not participate.

So what’s wrong with this?

Collusion and price fixing, that’s what. It is absolutely unlawful for competitors to act together to keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group is doing.

What a bunch of khunts