These are the strange effects of ZIRP and infinite QE. Many companies never had to care at all about profit and could just do things "for fun", and still see valuations skyrocket as long as they hired more people. What a time.
The fact that the music continued so long and led to incredible valuation inflation over the last 15 years made the excesses look a lot worse, but even in a more sane financial environment I'd argue you'd still want to do these things to be competitive in an attention-economy, just maybe not to the extremes we saw.
Blaming low interest rates on taking risk and doing highly speculative things, and investing in a culture that values that by funding off the wall stuff puts too much emphasis on the capital markets. If the company was a steel producer, fine. If it’s a company that essentially captures the stuff of dreams and produces a service that executes thought stuff in machines, you have to decouple your R&D from capital management to the extent your free cash flow can accept it.
Note of course low interest rates and other capital market looseness will create more opportunity for this behavior, and not every company doing these things is doing some is a well managed way. But they don’t have to - that’s the magic of capitalism. Through a Darwinian process only those who strike magic win and survive and the others recycle and try again. This feels like a feature not a flaw of zero interest rates - it creates enormous value by virtue of incentivizing taking risk at a time of high innovation. There are times in history where innovation rates were very low, and zero interest rates would just incentivize broken behavior. But at a time when almost all growth is coming from innovation, maybe loose credit is smart. ml
Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a work environment that's structured like a regional bank.
Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing and private company, did fun things like hire economists (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate virtual, in-game economies [0].
Blizzard Entertainment had giant statues of orcs made and fan conventions before their downfall, ya know, in the ZIRP macro economic environment.
Google allowed their engineers 20% time. Before ZIRP.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis#Academic_care...
Depends on how you measure performance. ARPU? Very high. Shipping software? Super low.
I once heard that this was more like 120% time? Meaning, 'extracurricular activities' on company infra was allowed and encouraged, but not at the expense of regular productivity/output.
My anecdote, FWIW, is that some of the worst performing startups do these tricks too.
There's something about flashy events and boondoggles that sound good on LinkedIn that draws bad founders into spending waaay too much on parties and fun activities.
Stripe obviously isn't in that category, but never assume that because a company spends a lot on parties and events that they're doing well.
Every so often, she'd express frustration about the "over the top writing" in Silicon Valley. Way over half the time, I could tie whatever it was she was complaining about to some concrete story from our industry.
I think their go-to example was meeting up with a Google X person in their offices and that person getting huffy about something or other and then trying to storm out. But then they had trouble with their keycard so there was that awkward pause because they couldn't just storm out and slam the door. Best part was that they were on inline skates (and rocking a pony tail!) so it was a totally Mike Judge perfect moment - weird silent tension as pony tail skate master is trying to beep himself out of the room.
I've definitely seen and heard about lots of strange things in SV that people simply wouldn't believe if they heard it.
My wife thought the show couldn't be reality. I told her I'm confident that almost everything you see in this show happened in SV to at least someone, just not the same company/people in a short amount of time.
It's like if you took every story in SV history and compressed it to one company in 6 years.
I absolutely agree with this. Monkey see, monkey do.
I think the big winners who make it "fun" are the exceptions that prove the rule. Whatever they really have that leads to success (be it simply luck, timing, connections, market fit, whathaveyou) is a lot less visible and harder to replicate than the lazy, obvious stuff like "make the workplace fun for developers" which any wannabe can emulate.
I think the question is more about whether doing these things caused the company financial success, or whether the company's financial success caused them to do these things. It strikes me as plausible that it's almost always the latter, even if the company's financial success isn't attributable solely to the macroeconomic climate.
I think it’s usually a sign of success that to protect the golden goose you stop taking creative risks and focus on operational efficiency.
Macroeconomic conditions really matter a lot more for capital intensive enterprises like manufacturing, refining, real estate, etc. Most creative / R&D based companies are much less cost of capital sensitive and frankly low interest rates matter a heck of a lot less for their planning and operations.
Both « being successful » and « doing these things » could be caused by a single root cause: a leadership team playing the long game.
What companies?
Some of the best performing public tech companies of the past 30 years include Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Nvidia, and Microsoft.You can get some variety in this list by varying the exact start and end dates, but certainly the first 4 are going to make most lists. Others like Google and Facebook handily beat the total market.
Certainly a lot of companies that never went public (Instagram, WhatsApp, Credit Karma, etc...) performed very well for their investors when they got acquired. And some companies that since going public haven't been blockbuster successes, like Snowflake, still were probably very lucrative for their VCs and other early investors.
Anyway, I don't feel like most of the really great performing companies that come to my mind are particularly "fun," but maybe I maybe I'm not paying attention and/or don't know because I don't work at them.
Tony Hawk at this event is just a marketing stunt and his celebrity can be beneficial to drive engagement, impress potential customers, keep existing customers happy, help with recruiting, etc. Those stunts can get incredible attention. Look at how common celebrities in advertising and endorsements are.
Stock buybacks, having the Moody Blues play your annual meeting or the Rich-dad-poor-dad guy give a speech to execs and play down to their biases doesn't drive marketing or the product. Its what execs enjoy personally and burn through money for these entitlements. Instead this money should be used to give raises to the working class.
Also I'd substitute accountants for MBA's in your comment.
Adjusted for inflation, there were more buybacks in 2000 than in 2015 and interest rates were quite a bit higher in 2000 than in 2015.
• ZIRP = Zero Interest Rate Policy
No, they are inflationary policies; fear of deflation was one of the factors motivating them.
> because they reduce the amount of interest payments (which are no different
That's...mostly irrelevant. Yes, government interest payments would be inflationary because some of them go back into the domestic economy, but flooding the domestic economy with money through loose monetary policy is not net deflationary; the reduction in money pumped into the economy in interest payments is far less than the amount of money that is pumped into the economy to effect that reduction.
They pay less interest on reserves.
The effect on the economy of banks holding reserves rather than securities is otherwise negligible because both securities and reserves can be used to satisfy any liquidity requirements, so reserves and securities are functionally identical.
That’s why it’s so dumb that people get in a flap over the idea of the Treasury issuing reserves “out of thin air” but they are fine with the Tresury issuing new securities “out of thin air”.
They’re more or less the same operation.