Confidence Up... Down

Two confidence surveys hit my screen the same day, once again proving that you can always find data to support any investment outlook you want. Deloitte & Touche's quarterly venture capital confidence survey reports that VCs surveyed (in January) think that things are getting better.

On the other hand, Goldman Sachs surveyed CIOs in February and found little reason for optimism. Well, except to the extent that we can be happy that CIOs don't see tech spending going down any more.

In general, early stage investors should lead the market by some period as the companies we finance today will not be selling to those CIOs for another 6 to 18 months... the time it takes the early stage companies to develop and ship their products. Still, VCs are an optimistic bunch in general whereas CIOs are actually spending the dollars. I'm betting the CIOs are more right than the VCs right now.