Headline, November 07 2022/ ''' '' SILICON VALLEY SILENCE '' '''

''' '' SILICON VALLEY

 SILENCE '' '''

THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY - { for every subject in the world } - : ''Everybody, every single student in the world, every country and leader in the world, is assuming that somebody else is playing parent.''

That's all fun. Meanwhile and all along, the tech industry soared to record heights during the pandemic, and Party Round rode the frenzy with self-aware marketing stunts that poked fun at and celebrated  start-up culture.

THEN THE PARTY ABRUPTLY ENDED. Russia invaded Ukraine, inflation soared. Tech stocks crashed. Crypto crashed harder. Everything 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.

So Party Round adjusted. Making jokes about the absurdities of tech culture is fun when everyone is getting richer by the day, but they don't land the same way when everyone is getting laid off. ''Party Round is now Capital,'' the company announced last month.

With the new name, the company moved into banking services. It plans to trade amidst absurdist marketing campaigns for something more practical - a coworking space that its customers can use in New York.

''The Capital brand is definitely an evolution,'' said Jordi Hays, the company's chief executive. ''It's more mature. It's more sustainable.''

It is one of the signs that the start-up world's season of unbridled euphoria is really, truly over. Technology was largely immune to the pandemic's economic devastation, and many in the industry had hoped the current slump would be a momentary reset.

But after months of funding declines, layoffs and cost-cutting, the realization that start-ups are stuck in a sustained, gloomy, no-fun downturn has finally set in.

Founders are starting to see the writing on the wall,'' said Angela Lee, a finance professor specializing in venture capital at Columbia Business School. For years, market observers have predicted a downturn that never arrived, she said. Now, ''we're finally right.''

BETWEEN JULY AND SEPTEMBER - STARTUPS 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.

TECHIES are optimistic by nature. And some companies, including those focused on artificial intelligence and climate tech, have managed to whip up a modicum of hype.

But at TechCrunch Disrupt, an enormous startup conference in downtown San Francisco last month, speakers urged founders and tech workers to accept reality.

''The next few years are going to be a lot harder, and there will be less resources,'' said Sheel Mohnot, an investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures.

''You can't keep doing what you were doing last year and hoping for the same results,'' said Vieje Piauwasdy, a director at the equity planning provider Secfi. ''The market has changed. Everything has changed completely.''

Thejo Kote, the founder of Airbase, a provider of financial software, said many start-ups ''are either moderately overvalued, very overvalued or you're in La-La Land and you haven't realized that yet.''

On one panel, investors assured founders that it made sense to moderate their ambitions from building a $100 billion company to building, say, an $8 billion company. 

''We're going back to fundamentals now, which, I think, is good for everyone,'' said Kara Nortman, an investor at Upfront Ventures.

The term ''party round'' itself once had a bad reputation in tech. It describes instances in which a start-up raises small amounts of cash from a large number of investors. If things went badly, industry leaders argued, none of the company's many investors would step up and help.

''No single investor cares enough,'' Sam Altman, a tech investor and founder, wrote in a blog post criticizing the practise in 2013. ''Everybody assumes that somebody else is playing parent,'' Mark Suster, an investor at Upfront Ventures, wrote in 2011.

But that last decade of tech prosperity, growing valuations and an expanding pile of capital earmarked for startups have changed attitudes, taking the party round from a stigma to something to brag about. 

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Start-Ups, Investors, Workers and the World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Erin Griffith.

With most respectful and loving dedication to the Founder Framers of The World Students Society - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world........ : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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