Even Busts Can Be Good for Tech
There are any number of forces that could pull Silicon Valley out of its latest slump, and most of them start with the government.
These days, big tech CEOs are sounding like grizzled sea captains battening down the hatches for a macroeconomic storm. “This next year or two, the economy is going to test the long-term resolve of a lot of companies,” Amazon’s Andy Jassy noted in late November. “Our operational focus over the next few years is going to be on efficiency and discipline and rigor,” declared Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, “and just operating in a much tighter environment.” At Google, Sundar Pichai pledged to slow hiring and “focus on a clear set of business and product priorities.”
This is no dot-com bust. The big tech layoffs, while enormous, are a necessary reset after an extraordinary run of growth. Platform companies are down in value, but they still make a great deal of money. Given the frenzy of pandemic-era tech hiring, the layoffs thus far are only a fraction of the new jobs added since the start of 2020.
The era of easy money that fueled Silicon Valley’s longest and largest boom is over. Silicon Valley’s boom-and-bust history certainly shows why macro conditions matter—stagflation hammered the industry in the 1970s, low interest rates boosted it in the 1990s and the quantitative easing of the 2010s powered its longest and biggest boom so far. But other factors have shaped tech business cycles just as much and sometimes more.