Probably. I write half my comments drunk, so I wouldn’t use them as a basis for ESL learning 🙃

It’s a good catch!! Apologies for any confusion.

This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.

Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely: