Velocity's Levinsohn: 'Exits' will be tough

I just came back from Santa Monica where I caught up with one of our (Vator) investors, Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. While I was there, I saw Ross Levinsohn, one of the founding partners of venture capital firm Velocity Interactive Group. According to Ross (who is wearing the sunglasses in this video), Velocity has already done some 15 investments. I'll post that interview, as well as the latest one with Richard next week. In this interview, Ross shares his opinion about the current state of technology valuations, such as Slide and Ning (both half a billion), and Federated Media ($250 million). The "challenge becomes on the exit point," he said. "In theory, you'l have to go public" with those hefty valuations.

But how many multi-billion-dollar consumer Internet IPOs can the market absorb? I asked. Like many other observers, Ross doesn't believe there's any appetite in the public market for consumer Internet companies at current valuations. I also asked Ross, a former head of Fox Interactive Media, why News Corp's Rupert Murdoch was selling MySpace? According to Ross, Rupert is probably pretty wise to sell the site if he can get $5-plus billion for it. News Corp bought MySpace several years ago for some $600 million. Rumor has it that News Corp is trying to offload it to Yahoo for about $6 billion or so.