This is a familiar story from the 2000 dot-com bust. Let’s look at this chart again. It’s a long way down.
Silicon Valley’s Unbridled Euphoria Runs Into Economic Reality
Once-buzzy start-ups had held out against the new reality that the good times are over. No longer.
By Erin Griffith, The New York Times, Oct. 29, 2022
…For a while, it was fun. The tech industry soared to record heights during the pandemic… [snip examples]…
Then the party abruptly ended. Russia invaded Ukraine. Inflation soared. Tech stocks crashed. Crypto crashed harder. Funding dried up. Start-ups began laying off workers and cutting costs. Investors who had cheered on the exuberant market switched to ominous warnings about a downturn…
Between July and September, start-ups around the world raised $81 billion, a 53 percent drop from the same period a year ago, according to Crunchbase. It is the largest such decline since the site began tracking funding in 2007. More than 700 start-ups have laid off 93,000 workers this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts at start-ups. Over the past two weeks, weaker quarterly results at big tech companies, including Snap, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, sent the broader tech industry spiraling further downward…
[snip lots of stories about “party round” fund raising and startups that are tanking]
Now, even with the gloom, venture capital firms are sitting on enormous sums of capital. That money will have to be invested in start-ups.
“Eventually,” Mr. Hays said, “we’ll come back to euphoria.” [end quote]
As all METARs know, capitalism runs in cycles.
But the people who lose money during the first crash aren’t necessarily the same people who become euphoric during the later cycle peak.
Wendy