One of Silicon Valley's biggest investors just laid out a how-to guide for startups hoping to get funding in 2020. Here are 4 main takeaways from Silicon Valley Bank's report.

• Silicon Valley Bank, one of the major financial institutions catering to startups and venture capital in California's Bay Area, released its annual report on the state of private markets on Thursday.
• The report summarized startup performance in public and private markets in 2019 and laid out the guidelines for success in 2020.
• The report found that investors have a renewed focus on profitability, so much so that even seed-stage startups are expected to have revenue prior to outside investment. Larger companies are cutting back to meet similar restrictions.
• The 2010s popularized "private IPOs," or mega-rounds of outside funding that exceed $100 million, but VCs are getting smaller slices in these late-stage rounds.
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Profitability is back in vogue in Silicon Valley.

That's the essence of a new report out Thursday from Silicon Valley Bank, the preeminent financial institution in California's Bay Area serving venture capitalists and startups alike.

After the implosion at coworking startup WeWork, venture investors were forced to step back and take inventory of their portfolios, all the while asking themselves if they were making the same mistakes as SoftBank's Vision Fund. The $100 billion fund was notorious for pumping millions - or billions in WeWork's case - into high growth startups that were losing scads of money. By the end of 2019, it was clear that strategy wasn't working out for the Japanese fund, so VCs shifted again.

Profitability is now a non-negotiable business trait for founders looking to raise capital at even the earliest stages, the report found. Here are the key metrics all founders should keep in mind when pitching investors in 2020.