Steady Pessimism Around Some Private Tech

Nine months into our subscriber survey, some clear trends are emerging. The biggest standout from the data is that sentiment around Square, Lyft and Dropbox has been consistently pessimistic.

Overall, there’s been more negativity towards private companies than public ones. In the latest month, attitudes towards Lyft and Pinterest worsened, while sentiment around Dropbox and Square improved but was still very negative. Uber showed no change. (We calculate score by subtracting the percentage of respondents who were less optimistic from the percentage who were more.) Airbnb had a big improvement in its score this month. Sentiment towards the company has been strongly optimistic since the surveys started in November.