Updated: 01/02/2015 01:44:40 PM PST

Today: As Silicon Valley startups have money shoveled at them by venture capitalists, established firms try to stave off potential acquirers with financial tricks — what will 2015 bring?

The Lead: Expect more acquisitions and stalled IPOs in 2015

Silicon Valley experienced a growing generation gap in 2014, with younger companies receiving overwhelming attention while legacy tech firms performed a series of financial machinations to keep activist investors at bay.

This is the old school vs. the tremendous Wall Street focus on the new school, ClearPath Capital Partners Managing Partner Paul Boyd said.

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Foot traffic streams past Uber offices on Market Street in San Francisco, Calif, Monday evening, June 2, 2014. Uber received a $1.2 billion financing round that valued it at $40 billion. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

The newer Silicon Valley companies are finding such a warm welcome on private markets that they are delaying going public, except for a record biotech surge that was likely due to a different venture market for those firms. Late-stage venture financing of tech companies reached previously unseen heights in 2014, including Uber’s $1.2 billion financing round that valued it at $40 billion. a jaw-dropping valuation that was squashed soon after by

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com/2014/12/29/xiaomi-chinese-phone-maker-valued-at-45-billion/?_r=0>Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s $45 billion.

While those companies have had no difficulty finding private investors, they do face pressure from employees and former employees who want to cash out, which has juiced the private market for pre-IPO shares.

Companies on average are waiting to go public longer, which is good for the public markets, but the need by people that are leaving the company or left the private company to become liquid has become a really hot topic, Boyd noted.

Companies that were widely expected to go public in 2014, such as Box and Square, did not, and are still being watched closely heading into 2015, and Silicon Valley could see the same type of delay with Uber, Pinterest and other startups Wall Street may expect to see on the public markets this year.

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Cloud storage company Box headquarters in Los Altos, Calif. Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Silicon Valley is still waiting for Box to go public, perhaps in 2015. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

This is a slow evolutionary process, Santa Clara University finance professor Robert Hendershott said, calling older companies’ moves healthy signs of an industry dealing with the fact that its maturing and not denying it or resisting it.

The next step in the process for many of these companies will likely involve large mergers and acquisitions, at least for those who haven’t already started down that road. Companies in the top half of the SV150 were targeted for acquisitions at a rising rate in 2014. and those that weren’t purchased either jumped on large mergers or likely contemplated such a move.

Experts say that the trend will continue in 2015, with private equity even more involved than last year, when firms committed billions to buy Palo Alto’s Tibco Software and San Francisco’s Riverbed Technology.

It’s going to be a revenue-grab opportunity in 2015, and its going to be some of these older, established tech companies being the target, ClearPath Capital Partners Chief Investment Officer Brendan Connaughton predicted.

Connaughton and ClearPath colleague Boyd explained that a typical industry cycle moves from a strong venture-capital environment to a strong market for initial public offerings, then hot stocks on Wall Street that cool down and offer opportunities for private equity. Silicon Valley appears to be entering the later stage — at least for the companies established in the tech sector’s beginnings, which are trading with smaller ratios than younger rivals.

We’re in the 6th or 7th inning of an economic cycle, and I use the word inning because innings are obviously not time-definite, Boyd said. You could have a really long 6th or 7th inning.

With legacy companies possibly exiting the public markets through acquisitions, and young startups delaying their market debuts, investment opportunities in Silicon Valley tech could shrink slightly, leading to even more growth for stocks. The Nasdaq neared its dot-com-boom-era high in 2014 and could surpass it in 2015, when experts believe Wall Street’s bull market will continue .

Meanwhile, the technology that Silicon Valley is known for will continue to advance, with contributions from older and younger companies.

The innovation continues at a pretty breathtaking pace, and a lot of that will happen in the larger, established companies, Hendershott said.

SV150 market report

Up: GoPro, Zynga, Netflix, Twitter, Yelp, AMD, Gilead, Juniper, Facebook, Nvidia

Down: Workday, Oracle, Tesla, Intuit, SolarCity, Apple, Yahoo, Pandora, VMware, Adobe, SunPower

The SV150 index of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies: Down 6.24, or 0.37 percent, to 1,664.17

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 9.24, or 0.2 percent, to 4,726.81

The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 9.92, or 0.06 percent, to 17,832.99

And the widely watched Standard & Poor’s 500 index: Down 0.70, or 0.03 percent, to 2,058.20

This is the final installment in a series on 2014 financial trends — for previous installments, go to www.siliconvalley.com/60secondbusinessbreak. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510 .