The Tech Boom Is Over, for Some

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The Tech Boom Is Over, for Some

The Australian Financial Review2022-11-25

When you approach Facebook’s headquarters at Menlo Park on the outskirts of San Francisco, you are greeted with a large white sign displaying the company’s new Meta logo and a reminder you’re about to...

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But after failing to innovate and subsequently laying off tens of thousands of workers over the following decades, the firm was sold off to software firm Oracle in 2009.Facebook’s Meta sign welcoming visitors to its Menlo Park HQ. APAt its peak, the company employed more than 30,000 workers, many at the Menlo Park facility, and when Mark Zuckerberg needed a home for his fast-growing social media start-up in 2011, he settled on the old Sun grounds.And so, the story goes, Zuckerberg – a self-described history nerd – loved the idea of literally moving on to the turf of a former tech powerhouse, but had one request: Keep the Sun sign.So the sign was flipped, Facebook on one side, Sun Microsystems on the other, and it would serve as a daily reminder for Facebook employees of how quickly a company could go from the top of the tech industry, to stasis and mass lay-offs.The unsustainable boomIt’s a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley’s founders and CEOs who have spent recent months being urged by investors to lay off workers as the tide of unique economic factors brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic recedes.Rising inflation and surging interest rates have seen markets tank, with many of the biggest losers being the mega-cap tech firms like Meta and Amazon, and high-growth tech names such as PayPal, Zoom and Shopify. Most large tech firms have begun so-called RIFs ... techspeak for a reduction in force.In Australia, Meta and Twitter have cut jobs, with Amazon-backed Deliveroo shutting its doors and putting thousands of riders out of work. Venture capital markets have turned away from cutting big cheques for cash-burning start-ups, with the ultrafast delivery sector in particular facing a crunch.Even high-flying, cash-producing firms such as Canva have faced a reality check – with the Australian success story seeing its market valuation slashed by 44 per cent.“There was just so much growth in Silicon Valley and tech firms broadly over the last two years and so much of it was key to the particular circumstances of the pandemic,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor at Seattle-based Washington University who specialises in tech history. She predicts the industry is heading for a slowdown. “It wasn’t sustainable from a macroeconomic or historical perspective.”Shares in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have tumbled this year. APLeading the way has been Zuckerberg’s social media company. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced the biggest round of lay-offs in the company’s short history. The founder and CEO said that about 13 per cent, or more than 11,000 employees, would soon be without a job.Zuckerberg apologised to the company, which had added tens of thousands of workers in the run-up to the end of the pandemic. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he said.Meta’s revenue had fallen for two consecutive quarters and the company told Wall Street in October that it expected to report another decrease this quarter. Altimeter Capital Manager, an influential institutional investor, went public with a request for the company to urgently slash costs.Over the last month, Amazon has followed in Meta’s footsteps, announcing more than 10,000 white-collar workers would be laid off. California-based streaming company Netflix recently sacked 450 employees while e-commerce firm Shopify, software giant Salesforce and financial start-up Stripe have all announced more than 1000 workers would go.Elon Musk has taken a sledgehammer to Twitter. He has reportedly sacked 4800 staff – about two thirds of the employee base. Search giant Google has put in place a corporate hiring freeze – an unusual measure for a company that had been hiring apace.The Silicon cyclesThe US tech industry has been rising and falling and rising since the first academics began tinkering with computers and forming start-ups in the ’60s and ’70s.O’Mara says that tech, particularly around Silicon Valley, has always been subject to boom and bust cycles, such as the dotcom bust of the late ’90s and early 2000s, the flatlining of the PC boom, and the defence cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s after the Cold War.“Probably for people who are younger in the industry this all seems quite shocking, particularly as those are the people being laid off,” Professor O’Mara says.“But when you take a look at how this flows down from the tech space, it creates more space for other companies and alternatives to grow up.”One of those companies that benefited from the dotcom bust, O’Mara recalls, was Google.When the market turned on internet companies in the late 1990s, the young search giant already had backing from investors and picked up employees and equipment from some of the best firms which went bankrupt.Notably, Google’s current headquarters are built on the old site of computer-maker Silicon Graphics in Mountain View.Julie Inman Grant – who is now Australia’s eSafety Commissioner – graduated from university and in the late ’90s scored a coveted job working as a lobbyist for Microsoft, then the biggest tech firm in the world.Inman Grant recalls going with founder Bill Gates to meet with members of Congress in Washington, but the founder showed up under-dressed. One of the first tasks she can remember was trying to get her boss a jacket on the Hill. “We felt like we were the centre of the universe,” she says. “They were heady days!”After a career spanning three decades working for several major tech firms, in both the United States and Australia, Inman Grant says the current spate of lay-offs comes after companies “misread” the boom in customers and revenue from COVID-19 and the historically low-interest rate environment, which gave money-losing start-ups access to cheap capital.Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has been working in the US and Australian tech industry for more than 30 years.  Rhett Wyman/SMH“The tech industry went off over the pandemic because everyone in the world was online,” she says. “But I think they all misread that as, like, a tectonic shift. Or that the ascendancy would just continue.”Inman Grant was Twitter’s first head of public policy in Australia and was brought into the company in 2014. Twitter Australia took on dozens of employees who worked on tackling thorny issues around bullying and content moderation.This month, new owner Elon Musk all but dismantled these types of local teams, firing policy and content moderation teams in the Asia Pacific. Twitter’s presence in Australia now exists mostly of sales staff, while there is one person doing the public policy role, Inman Grant says. No one responds to questions from journalists about anything to do with Twitter.TikTok surfs the topBut if some companies are laying off staff, others are just hitting their stride.For example, TikTok told recently laid-off Twitter and Facebook employees that jobs were available at the company, this masthead revealed earlier this week.TikTok now has more than nine million users in Australia, which may put it in the crosshairs of regulators. Olive + MaeveAs a private company, owned by China’s Bytedance, TikTok remains tight-lipped about numbers. But according to recent filings, TikTok Australia booked revenue of $75 million in the 2021 calendar year.TikTok now has more than nine million monthly active users, according to a person familiar with the matter - around one in three of the country’s total population.Staff at the company were recently informed they had successfully hit aggressive targets to ‘five times revenue’ over the course of this year, this person said. The firm has told staff it has a target of doubling revenue next year.There are possible pitfalls ahead for TikTok. The app is in the crosshairs of regulators and politicians, particularly concerned about the Australian subsidiary’s Chinese ownership and handling of customer data.For now, the Australian subsidiary takes up office space at a WeWork co-share in Sydney’s Barangaroo. That will soon change. Staff have been informed of plans to take over three floors of the soon-to-built Salesforce tower at Circular Quay. That would put TikTok atop some of the most impressive commercial real estate in Australia.","kind":null,"is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[{"id":9966919950,"gmtCreate":1669375444970,"gmtModify":1676538190801,"author":{"id":"4088503910203750","authorId":"4088503910203750","name":"JaneLeon","avatar":"https://static.itradeup.com/news/0e3822eaa2f6d260a8571fcf6449536d","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"4088503910203750","authorIdStr":"4088503910203750"},"htmlText":"Thanks","listText":"Thanks","text":"Thanks","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9966919950","repostId":1140664044,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1140664044","pubTimestamp":1669374125,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1140664044?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2022-11-25 19:02","market":"us","language":"en","title":"The Tech Boom Is Over, for Some","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1140664044","media":"The Australian Financial Review","summary":"Rising inflation and surging interest rates have seen markets tank, with many of the biggest losers being the mega-cap tech firms.","content":"<html><head></head><body><p>When you approach Facebook’s headquarters at Menlo Park on the outskirts of San Francisco, you are greeted with a large white sign displaying the company’s new Meta logo and a reminder you’re about to enter “1 Hacker Way”.</p><p>But if you were to peer around the other side of the sign, there you would see the branding of “Sun Microsystems” etched into the back.</p><p>Sun Microsystems, founded in 1982, was once a giant of the global tech industry, a seller of software and hardware. But after failing to innovate and subsequently laying off tens of thousands of workers over the following decades, the firm was sold off to software firm Oracle in 2009.</p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/50202b90ba8212eba202e77e143fc4f2\" tg-width=\"2200\" tg-height=\"1467\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"/><span>Facebook’s Meta sign welcoming visitors to its Menlo Park HQ. AP</span></p><p>At its peak, the company employed more than 30,000 workers, many at the Menlo Park facility, and when Mark Zuckerberg needed a home for his fast-growing social media start-up in 2011, he settled on the old Sun grounds.</p><p>And so, the story goes, Zuckerberg – a self-described history nerd – loved the idea of literally moving on to the turf of a former tech powerhouse, but had one request: Keep the Sun sign.</p><p>So the sign was flipped, Facebook on one side, Sun Microsystems on the other, and it would serve as a daily reminder for Facebook employees of how quickly a company could go from the top of the tech industry, to stasis and mass lay-offs.</p><h2>The unsustainable boom</h2><p>It’s a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley’s founders and CEOs who have spent recent months being urged by investors to lay off workers as the tide of unique economic factors brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic recedes.</p><p>Rising inflation and surging interest rates have seen markets tank, with many of the biggest losers being the mega-cap tech firms like Meta and Amazon, and high-growth tech names such as PayPal, Zoom and Shopify. Most large tech firms have begun so-called RIFs ... techspeak for a reduction in force.</p><p>In Australia, Meta and Twitter have cut jobs, with Amazon-backed Deliveroo shutting its doors and putting thousands of riders out of work. Venture capital markets have turned away from cutting big cheques for cash-burning start-ups, with the ultrafast delivery sector in particular facing a crunch.</p><p>Even high-flying, cash-producing firms such as Canva have faced a reality check – with the Australian success story seeing its market valuation slashed by 44 per cent.</p><p>“There was just so much growth in Silicon Valley and tech firms broadly over the last two years and so much of it was key to the particular circumstances of the pandemic,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor at Seattle-based Washington University who specialises in tech history. She predicts the industry is heading for a slowdown. “It wasn’t sustainable from a macroeconomic or historical perspective.”</p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/93cee14cf75241b56165069decf71481\" tg-width=\"2200\" tg-height=\"1467\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"/><span>Shares in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have tumbled this year. AP</span></p><p>Leading the way has been Zuckerberg’s social media company. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced the biggest round of lay-offs in the company’s short history. The founder and CEO said that about 13 per cent, or more than 11,000 employees, would soon be without a job.</p><p>Zuckerberg apologised to the company, which had added tens of thousands of workers in the run-up to the end of the pandemic. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he said.</p><p>Meta’s revenue had fallen for two consecutive quarters and the company told Wall Street in October that it expected to report another decrease this quarter. Altimeter Capital Manager, an influential institutional investor, went public with a request for the company to urgently slash costs.</p><p>Over the last month, Amazon has followed in Meta’s footsteps, announcing more than 10,000 white-collar workers would be laid off. California-based streaming company Netflix recently sacked 450 employees while e-commerce firm Shopify, software giant Salesforce and financial start-up Stripe have all announced more than 1000 workers would go.</p><p>Elon Musk has taken a sledgehammer to Twitter. He has reportedly sacked 4800 staff – about two thirds of the employee base. Search giant Google has put in place a corporate hiring freeze – an unusual measure for a company that had been hiring apace.</p><h2>The Silicon cycles</h2><p>The US tech industry has been rising and falling and rising since the first academics began tinkering with computers and forming start-ups in the ’60s and ’70s.</p><p>O’Mara says that tech, particularly around Silicon Valley, has always been subject to boom and bust cycles, such as the dotcom bust of the late ’90s and early 2000s, the flatlining of the PC boom, and the defence cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s after the Cold War.</p><p>“Probably for people who are younger in the industry this all seems quite shocking, particularly as those are the people being laid off,” Professor O’Mara says.</p><p>“But when you take a look at how this flows down from the tech space, it creates more space for other companies and alternatives to grow up.”</p><p>One of those companies that benefited from the dotcom bust, O’Mara recalls, was Google.</p><p>When the market turned on internet companies in the late 1990s, the young search giant already had backing from investors and picked up employees and equipment from some of the best firms which went bankrupt.</p><p>Notably, Google’s current headquarters are built on the old site of computer-maker Silicon Graphics in Mountain View.</p><p>Julie Inman Grant – who is now Australia’s eSafety Commissioner – graduated from university and in the late ’90s scored a coveted job working as a lobbyist for Microsoft, then the biggest tech firm in the world.</p><p>Inman Grant recalls going with founder Bill Gates to meet with members of Congress in Washington, but the founder showed up under-dressed. One of the first tasks she can remember was trying to get her boss a jacket on the Hill. “We felt like we were the centre of the universe,” she says. “They were heady days!”</p><p>After a career spanning three decades working for several major tech firms, in both the United States and Australia, Inman Grant says the current spate of lay-offs comes after companies “misread” the boom in customers and revenue from COVID-19 and the historically low-interest rate environment, which gave money-losing start-ups access to cheap capital.</p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/492b4b4fb438008043c4e5f8b72b81bd\" tg-width=\"2200\" tg-height=\"1467\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"/><span>Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has been working in the US and Australian tech industry for more than 30 years.  Rhett Wyman/SMH</span></p><p>“The tech industry went off over the pandemic because everyone in the world was online,” she says. “But I think they all misread that as, like, a tectonic shift. Or that the ascendancy would just continue.”</p><p>Inman Grant was Twitter’s first head of public policy in Australia and was brought into the company in 2014. Twitter Australia took on dozens of employees who worked on tackling thorny issues around bullying and content moderation.</p><p><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/c68167cceee7d9ccce762db67d1e2700\" tg-width=\"907\" tg-height=\"490\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"/></p><p>This month, new owner Elon Musk all but dismantled these types of local teams, firing policy and content moderation teams in the Asia Pacific. Twitter’s presence in Australia now exists mostly of sales staff, while there is one person doing the public policy role, Inman Grant says. No one responds to questions from journalists about anything to do with Twitter.</p><h2>TikTok surfs the top</h2><p>But if some companies are laying off staff, others are just hitting their stride.</p><p>For example, TikTok told recently laid-off Twitter and Facebook employees that jobs were available at the company, this masthead revealed earlier this week.</p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/aa9f379ebb049bd8f326cb64a1e42a99\" tg-width=\"2200\" tg-height=\"1467\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"/><span>TikTok now has more than nine million users in Australia, which may put it in the crosshairs of regulators. Olive + Maeve</span></p><p>As a private company, owned by China’s Bytedance, TikTok remains tight-lipped about numbers. But according to recent filings, TikTok Australia booked revenue of $75 million in the 2021 calendar year.</p><p>TikTok now has more than nine million monthly active users, according to a person familiar with the matter - around one in three of the country’s total population.</p><p>Staff at the company were recently informed they had successfully hit aggressive targets to ‘five times revenue’ over the course of this year, this person said. The firm has told staff it has a target of doubling revenue next year.</p><p>There are possible pitfalls ahead for TikTok. The app is in the crosshairs of regulators and politicians, particularly concerned about the Australian subsidiary’s Chinese ownership and handling of customer data.</p><p>For now, the Australian subsidiary takes up office space at a WeWork co-share in Sydney’s Barangaroo. That will soon change. Staff have been informed of plans to take over three floors of the soon-to-built Salesforce tower at Circular Quay. That would put TikTok atop some of the most impressive commercial real estate in Australia.</p></body></html>","source":"afr_stock","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>The Tech Boom Is Over, for Some</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nThe Tech Boom Is Over, for Some\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2022-11-25 19:02 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.afr.com/technology/the-tech-boom-is-over-for-some-20221124-p5c125><strong>The Australian Financial Review</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>When you approach Facebook’s headquarters at Menlo Park on the outskirts of San Francisco, you are greeted with a large white sign displaying the company’s new Meta logo and a reminder you’re about to...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.afr.com/technology/the-tech-boom-is-over-for-some-20221124-p5c125\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"LYFT":"Lyft, Inc.","NFLX":"奈飞","SHOP":"Shopify Inc","AMZN":"亚马逊","TWTR":"Twitter","CRM":"赛富时","META":"Meta Platforms, Inc."},"source_url":"https://www.afr.com/technology/the-tech-boom-is-over-for-some-20221124-p5c125","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1140664044","content_text":"When you approach Facebook’s headquarters at Menlo Park on the outskirts of San Francisco, you are greeted with a large white sign displaying the company’s new Meta logo and a reminder you’re about to enter “1 Hacker Way”.But if you were to peer around the other side of the sign, there you would see the branding of “Sun Microsystems” etched into the back.Sun Microsystems, founded in 1982, was once a giant of the global tech industry, a seller of software and hardware. But after failing to innovate and subsequently laying off tens of thousands of workers over the following decades, the firm was sold off to software firm Oracle in 2009.Facebook’s Meta sign welcoming visitors to its Menlo Park HQ. APAt its peak, the company employed more than 30,000 workers, many at the Menlo Park facility, and when Mark Zuckerberg needed a home for his fast-growing social media start-up in 2011, he settled on the old Sun grounds.And so, the story goes, Zuckerberg – a self-described history nerd – loved the idea of literally moving on to the turf of a former tech powerhouse, but had one request: Keep the Sun sign.So the sign was flipped, Facebook on one side, Sun Microsystems on the other, and it would serve as a daily reminder for Facebook employees of how quickly a company could go from the top of the tech industry, to stasis and mass lay-offs.The unsustainable boomIt’s a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley’s founders and CEOs who have spent recent months being urged by investors to lay off workers as the tide of unique economic factors brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic recedes.Rising inflation and surging interest rates have seen markets tank, with many of the biggest losers being the mega-cap tech firms like Meta and Amazon, and high-growth tech names such as PayPal, Zoom and Shopify. Most large tech firms have begun so-called RIFs ... techspeak for a reduction in force.In Australia, Meta and Twitter have cut jobs, with Amazon-backed Deliveroo shutting its doors and putting thousands of riders out of work. Venture capital markets have turned away from cutting big cheques for cash-burning start-ups, with the ultrafast delivery sector in particular facing a crunch.Even high-flying, cash-producing firms such as Canva have faced a reality check – with the Australian success story seeing its market valuation slashed by 44 per cent.“There was just so much growth in Silicon Valley and tech firms broadly over the last two years and so much of it was key to the particular circumstances of the pandemic,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor at Seattle-based Washington University who specialises in tech history. She predicts the industry is heading for a slowdown. “It wasn’t sustainable from a macroeconomic or historical perspective.”Shares in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have tumbled this year. APLeading the way has been Zuckerberg’s social media company. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced the biggest round of lay-offs in the company’s short history. The founder and CEO said that about 13 per cent, or more than 11,000 employees, would soon be without a job.Zuckerberg apologised to the company, which had added tens of thousands of workers in the run-up to the end of the pandemic. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he said.Meta’s revenue had fallen for two consecutive quarters and the company told Wall Street in October that it expected to report another decrease this quarter. Altimeter Capital Manager, an influential institutional investor, went public with a request for the company to urgently slash costs.Over the last month, Amazon has followed in Meta’s footsteps, announcing more than 10,000 white-collar workers would be laid off. California-based streaming company Netflix recently sacked 450 employees while e-commerce firm Shopify, software giant Salesforce and financial start-up Stripe have all announced more than 1000 workers would go.Elon Musk has taken a sledgehammer to Twitter. He has reportedly sacked 4800 staff – about two thirds of the employee base. Search giant Google has put in place a corporate hiring freeze – an unusual measure for a company that had been hiring apace.The Silicon cyclesThe US tech industry has been rising and falling and rising since the first academics began tinkering with computers and forming start-ups in the ’60s and ’70s.O’Mara says that tech, particularly around Silicon Valley, has always been subject to boom and bust cycles, such as the dotcom bust of the late ’90s and early 2000s, the flatlining of the PC boom, and the defence cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s after the Cold War.“Probably for people who are younger in the industry this all seems quite shocking, particularly as those are the people being laid off,” Professor O’Mara says.“But when you take a look at how this flows down from the tech space, it creates more space for other companies and alternatives to grow up.”One of those companies that benefited from the dotcom bust, O’Mara recalls, was Google.When the market turned on internet companies in the late 1990s, the young search giant already had backing from investors and picked up employees and equipment from some of the best firms which went bankrupt.Notably, Google’s current headquarters are built on the old site of computer-maker Silicon Graphics in Mountain View.Julie Inman Grant – who is now Australia’s eSafety Commissioner – graduated from university and in the late ’90s scored a coveted job working as a lobbyist for Microsoft, then the biggest tech firm in the world.Inman Grant recalls going with founder Bill Gates to meet with members of Congress in Washington, but the founder showed up under-dressed. One of the first tasks she can remember was trying to get her boss a jacket on the Hill. “We felt like we were the centre of the universe,” she says. “They were heady days!”After a career spanning three decades working for several major tech firms, in both the United States and Australia, Inman Grant says the current spate of lay-offs comes after companies “misread” the boom in customers and revenue from COVID-19 and the historically low-interest rate environment, which gave money-losing start-ups access to cheap capital.Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has been working in the US and Australian tech industry for more than 30 years.  Rhett Wyman/SMH“The tech industry went off over the pandemic because everyone in the world was online,” she says. “But I think they all misread that as, like, a tectonic shift. Or that the ascendancy would just continue.”Inman Grant was Twitter’s first head of public policy in Australia and was brought into the company in 2014. Twitter Australia took on dozens of employees who worked on tackling thorny issues around bullying and content moderation.This month, new owner Elon Musk all but dismantled these types of local teams, firing policy and content moderation teams in the Asia Pacific. Twitter’s presence in Australia now exists mostly of sales staff, while there is one person doing the public policy role, Inman Grant says. No one responds to questions from journalists about anything to do with Twitter.TikTok surfs the topBut if some companies are laying off staff, others are just hitting their stride.For example, TikTok told recently laid-off Twitter and Facebook employees that jobs were available at the company, this masthead revealed earlier this week.TikTok now has more than nine million users in Australia, which may put it in the crosshairs of regulators. Olive + MaeveAs a private company, owned by China’s Bytedance, TikTok remains tight-lipped about numbers. But according to recent filings, TikTok Australia booked revenue of $75 million in the 2021 calendar year.TikTok now has more than nine million monthly active users, according to a person familiar with the matter - around one in three of the country’s total population.Staff at the company were recently informed they had successfully hit aggressive targets to ‘five times revenue’ over the course of this year, this person said. The firm has told staff it has a target of doubling revenue next year.There are possible pitfalls ahead for TikTok. The app is in the crosshairs of regulators and politicians, particularly concerned about the Australian subsidiary’s Chinese ownership and handling of customer data.For now, the Australian subsidiary takes up office space at a WeWork co-share in Sydney’s Barangaroo. That will soon change. Staff have been informed of plans to take over three floors of the soon-to-built Salesforce tower at Circular Quay. That would put TikTok atop some of the most impressive commercial real estate in Australia.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"comments":[{"id":104955030,"gmtCreate":1669382379195,"gmtModify":1669382392112,"authorId":4122870748721992,"author":{"id":4122870748721992,"idStr":"4122870748721992","authorId":4122870748721992,"name":"aureliapy","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/d697489b07375cc120656938029c9069","vip":1,"currentWearingBadge":{"badgeId":"a83d7582f45846ffbccbce770ce65d84-1","templateUuid":"a83d7582f45846ffbccbce770ce65d84","name":"Real Trader","description":"Completed a transaction","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2e08a1cc2087a1de93402c2c290fa65b","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4504a6397ce1137932d56e5f4ce27166","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/4b22c79415b4cd6e3d8ebc4a0fa32604","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":1,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2022.08.09","individualDisplayEnabled":0,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1100},"crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"individualDisplayBadges":[]},"repliedAuthorId":0,"objectId":9966919950,"type":1,"supId":0,"prevId":0,"content":"<u>ok</u>","text":"<u>ok</u>","html":"<u>ok</u>"}],"langContent":"EN"}],"hasMoreComments":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":16,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false}}