Adam Schwab: Why Klarna, Paypal and Netflix are cutting jobs and no tech company is immune

If there’s a single phrase that investors, businesses and tech workers should live by above all else it’s this: everything always reverts to the mean.

We’re seeing that play out primarily in technology equity valuations. Unsurprisingly, the last few years of insanity are fast resembling 1998-99 (and 2022 is starting to look a lot like 2001). The reckoning, inspired by a slight normalisation in interest rates, started in the public markets, where even brilliant businesses like Shopify (down 80%), Atlassian (down 65%) and Zoom (down 83%) have been hard hit.

Netflix has seen its market value plummet from US$300 billion ($423 billion) to only $80 billion ($112 billion), while even Apple, Google and Microsoft haven’t been immune.