The sentiment in Silicon Valley has officially shifted: The tech boom is over, and we're entering a down cycle.
That became clearer than ever last week when a couple of public companies, Tableau and LinkedIn, lost almost half of their value in a day.
But at least one VC says that it won't be as bad this time as it was after the Great Recession or the dot-com bust.
Rich Wong is a partner at Accel, one of Silicon Valley's quiet giants, and the first firm to invest in Facebook in 2005.
He told USA Today (emphasis added):
Yes, when you step back and look at 2009, after the Global Financial Crisis, and we can all remember 2001, after the Nasdaq peaked. I think there were dramatic resets, to the point a lot of companies went out of business. I personally don't think [the] environment is anywhere close to as difficult as 2008-2009, 2001.
Why does he think it's different? The interview didn't give much reason, but in a follow-up email to Business Insider, Wong said that the shift to mobile (for consumers and businesses) and the cloud (mainly for businesses) are long-term trends that still have a lot of runway ahead. Those shifts were at much earlier stages in the previous downturns. As he wrote us:
I believe when one steps back to look at a 5 to 7 year medium range, we are still in the growth phase of a few very powerful (and positive) secular trends. As two examples among many, the rise of mobile to > 50% of the world's population (3.5B smartphones by EOY 2016), and the shift from datacenter to cloud & SaaS [software-as-a-service] are 2 major forces that will continue to create opportunities for startups to disrupt incumbent players, and create new markets.
He did note in the interview that a lot of this boom's companies are enterprises with "real businesses, they have real revenue, they have real clarity about which customers they're selling to." He's a little more skeptical about the consumer market, particularly the wave of on-demand startups that haven't proved that they can be profitable on a unit basis.
Wong has some firsthand knowledge here. He sits on the board of Atlassian — one of the few tech companies in the current boom that's consistently profitable despite spending no money on sales and marketing.
Atlassian was also the last big IPO before the current market malaise, as it went public in December. It's now trading slightly below its IPO price of $21, which is actually better than most of the other IPOs from the class of 2015.
One point to note about enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies: One of the high fliers of last year, Zenefits, reportedly counted as its biggest customer another startup called Jet. That company has taken more than half a billion in venture funding in its quixotic attempt to unseat Amazon, and has already had to change its business plan once.
So today's crop of enterprise startups indeed may have "real customers." But if those real customers are the consumer startups that are first to vaporize in the current bust, that's still trouble.
