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Interesting piece on SFIST reflecting on recent NY Times articles on the change in fortunes of some high-profile 'tech ' companies that have made significant redundancies in the last few weeks.
The Doomsayers are calling a bubble about to burst, but that feels a long way wide of the mark. Executive search is often viewed as the 'canary in the coalmine' - a lead indicator of hard times ahead - and we're certainly seeing no let up in the demand for our services, in Europe or the US.
A better explanation of recent events would seem to be that this is the natural result of some big investments that were made in bad businesses during frothy times. WeWork turned out to be a serviced office company and Zume turned out to be a Pizza delivery company. After looking at the S1 it seems many industry luminaries are speculating that Casper might just be a mattress company. Strange times.....
Two seafaring sayings often used by Warren Buffett come to mind here: "A rising tide carries all ships" and "Only when the tide goes out do you find out who was swimming naked"
The robot reckoning may be afoot, as the New York Times finds that startups have laid off more than 8,000 people in the last four months. The New York Times does not have a sterling track record of predicting San Francisco and Silicon Valley business patterns, as evidenced just ten months ago when their prediction that “San Francisco will drown in millionaires” was not borne out by said drowning in said millionaires (at least, not any more than it ever has been in the last decade or so.) But their latest analysis of our high-flying tech economy has hard numbers, and sobering ones at that for any company relying on the disruptive funding/corporate welfare that we call venture capital.
https://sfist.com/2020/02/25/startup-boom-starting-to-bust-as-layoffs-sweep-silicon-valley/
unknownx500
