I think it’s a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.

If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:

Interest rates and inflation is probably a significant source of panic for high growth tech companies with poor earnings.

When interest rates are low, there isn’t a lot of worry about future dollars being eroded by inflation, and investors tend to pay a premium for growth and future earnings. Money is easy to borrow in that kind of environment, so a company that has lots of growth, increasing daily active users, poor earnings, but the hope of finding ways to increase earnings, that kind of company will see their valuation skyrocket and they can use that valuation to secure funding.

When it flips around and interest rates are high, inflation is high, future earnings get eroded by inflation (a dollar in 2021 was stronger than a dollar in 2023), suddenly a company that has shit earnings and huge growth is a lot less desirable compared to a company that has consistent earnings and dividends. That growth stock with shit earnings used to rely on their valuation to generate funding to power that growth, suddenly that entire siphon gets broken, their valuation falls from the sky into reasonable territory, money is hard to borrow, and they’re stuck trying to stay afloat mostly with their shitty earnings.

After the great recession, tech was a very dirty word. We’re talking years after the great recession, 2012-2014 even. People didn’t want to invest in companies that didn’t make any money. 2020-2021, pandemic, lockdowns, historically low interest rates, all that, money was so easy to borrow and growth was so huge from people being stuck indoors that a lot of tech companies with shitty earnings had such insane growth metrics like daily active users that these companies went to the moon. Twilio, TWLO for example, quadrupled from pre-pandemic highs. 2022-2023, inflation becomes a very real thing and things are opening up again, all those metrics drop to normal levels, money is harder to borrow, future dollars getting eroded, growth tech gets crushed, TWLO is suddenly trading at levels lower than pre-pandemic (lost 80% of its value from pandemic highs).

We’re seeing a lot of ‘internet’ type tech companies go from boom to bust, and now they need to do whatever they can to drum up money the good old fashioned way - from generating income as opposed to securing funding through growth (debt).

Not only stuff like Twitter and Reddit, but Netflix cracking down on account sharing. A couple years back Netflix viewed account sharing less as a loss of revenue and more as an ‘unauthorized permanent trial’, hopefully some bandits eventually get their own account for the sake of convenience… But nowadays Netflix needs to think shorter-term and behave a bit more self-sufficiently, so they’re starting to take a more direct approach to compel people to obtain subscriptions.

Something like gfycat, when money is easy to borrow and inflation is low, investors will line up to pile in even if there is practically no revenue, because eventually they might monetize it and become wildly profitable… But in this environment nobody wants to touch something like that, so a zero revenue entity either scrambles for profitability or they simply dry out

Time for a open-source youtube alternative, I haven’t yet been convinced that Odysee, Rumble, Nebula are it.

Greedy capitalists believe line must always go up. They will sacrifice every moral principle to their invisible hand god.

Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.