Sluggish market weighs on private valuations

With the stock market on a downward spiral, institutional analysts covering Google (which reports Q1 results Thursday), Yahoo and other big-name Internet companies are betting public market investors won't have any appetite for high-profile private companies at their valuations. Moreover, expectations are that valuations in the private sector will have to come down by some 30%to 40% to reflect what's happening in the public sectors.

This is according to Jefferies & Company's Youssef Squali. Youssef and I were on a panel at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit East conference in Boston recently.  "A lot of the companies are unable to go public," he said. "It's not because of fundamentals, but the overall market. There are a lot of deals waiting on the sidelines."

As for what kind of revenues and profitability a company must reach to even be considered to go public, Squali said that revenue should be in "excess of $50 million."