저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 빅테크 긴축과 경기침체 우려로 시장 조정이 이어질 가능성이 크지만, 지금은 분할 매수를 시작할 시점이라는 입장. 빅테크 주가 민감도: 애플·페이스북·구글·마이크로소프트는 안전자산 성격의 현금창출 기업이지만 밸류에이션에 가장 민감하다고 봄. 이들이 긴축 신호를 보내는 것 자체가 업계 전반의 경고라고 주장. 실리콘밸리 비용 사이클: 2001~2003 닷컴 붕괴 후 디플레이션기를 거쳐, 2004년 이후 구글 등의 복지·고임금 경쟁이 업계 표준이 됨. 현재는 이 사이클이 반전되어 복지·보상·이직 기회가 줄어드는 국면이라고 진단. 경기침체 전망: 빅테크 고용·보상 축소는 광범위한 경기침체의 선행지표. 레이 달리오 등의 '하드 랜딩' 발언을 인용하며 2023년 침체를 전제로 함. 연착륙을 말하는 사람은 이제 없다고 언급. 할리우드·넷플릭스 사례: 넷플릭스 주가 급락으로 대형 콘텐츠 계약이 중단되고 작가 시장이 식었음. 이는 암호화폐·성장주 중심의 자산 거품이 실물경제(작가 등)로 번졌다는 근거로 제시. 매수 시점 판단: 시장이 뉴스를 소화하며 조정 중이며, 매일 쌓이는 신호상 이제 '조금씩 사모을(nibbling) 때'이며 본격 투입을 준비할 시기라고 함. 현재 가격은 이미 알려진 정보를 반영하므로 중요한 것은 앞으로의 전개라고 설명. 연준 풋 소멸: 과거 연준이 시장 불안 때마다 최후의 매수자 역할을 했으나, 이 '풋'이 사라져야 빅테크의 비합리적 비용 경쟁이 끝나고 진짜 가격 발견(price discovery)이 가능하다고 주장. 이를 건전한 정화 과정으로 평가. 빅테크 다음 국면: 성장 둔화를 인정하는 단계로, 주가 멀티플 밴드가 좁아져 현금창출 기업(캐시카우)처럼 비용 통제가 중요해질 것이라 전망. 실험과 자유로운 조직 운영이 줄어들고 경영진의 통제가 강화될 것으로 봄. 출연자 전망 요약: 단기적 추가 하락과 경기침체를 예상하면서도, 장기적으로는 과잉 거품이 빠지는 건강한 조정으로 보고 저가 분할 매수 기회로 인식.
다듬은 글
I actually think this is the beginning, because these companies, Apple, Facebook, Google, and maybe Microsoft a little bit, are the most sensitive to valuation. They are the most widely held. These are the equivalent of U.S. Treasuries in the equity markets: the safest, most predictable safe haven in times of stress. If you want to own big, chunky cash-flow-generating businesses that are relatively unassailable, you couldn't pick four better businesses than those. So the fact that they see enough on the horizon to say that we need to batten down the hatches should be a warning to everybody else.
I started working in Silicon Valley in 2001. We were right at the first year of the dot-com implosion, and all the fallout from the funding that happened between 1997 and 1999 and in 2000. From 2001 to 2003 it was super deflationary. Everyone was cutting costs, the money that had been raised was being pissed away, and companies were liquidating. Then starting in 2004, which is when I joined Google, there was a big movement of what people called Web 2.0. New business models and new businesses started to emerge that seemed to have real traction and real legs. It was a different story, and a much more rational one, than what you saw leading up to 2000 and 2001.
Around that time Google started offering these crazy benefits. There was a gym, free food, and all these amazing workplace perks, and suddenly everyone had to do it to keep up. Facebook obviously mimicked it, all the other big companies mimicked it, and then it became mainstay. They also raised compensation in the Valley significantly, because Google had really cracked the nut on how to extract value from the internet. It changed everything in Silicon Valley and in tech. Every tech company, whether enterprise software, hardware, or an internet e-commerce site, had to have the same environment to be competitive and hire great talent: high wages, great salaries, and sharing the value with employees through gyms, free food, and all that sort of thing.
Since 2003 and 2004 we've been seeing things start to turn the other way. Instead of adding more benefits and making things more attractive, we're seeing the recession hit these leading indicators of how things are going to be in the Valley. As a result, I think we should expect a similar impact on compensation, benefits, value sharing, the willingness to hire, and the opportunity to jump jobs, the things we've all taken for granted over the past 18 years. This is going to be a real shock to a lot of people who work in tech, and to people who have gotten used to the idea that every company offers great benefits and there's always another job to jump to that will pay more. As the engine of growth, driven by these big companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, starts to slow, no one needs to compete with them as much anymore. The compensation bands get tighter, the option value gets tighter, and the free stuff gets tighter. So it's the end of an era, and I think it's a new world for tech and Silicon Valley. The big takeaway is that nobody is safe. It's not just startups that have to tighten their belts; it's these big companies too. I think we're headed for a broad-based recession. That's what it seems like. You saw Druckenmiller's comments this week predicting a hard landing in 2023. No one's talking about a soft landing anymore. In fact, I wonder who's flying the plane. So I think we're headed for a pretty big recession.
I'll take it in a slightly different direction. I'm down here in LA. I had dinner the other night with a friend who's a showrunner in Hollywood. A showrunner is basically the head writer: they put together the writing team and the content for a show, and then they sell it to networks. He said that no one is buying anything anymore. Last year there was tremendous activity. You saw the Game of Thrones guys, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who got a 300 million dollar deal from Netflix, and Shonda Rhimes. They were massive, multi-hundred-million-dollar deals made last year, and those were just for future writing deals. Netflix wasn't even buying libraries when they did those deals. They were locking down talent for the next year. All of that has stopped. The reason is that Netflix's stock has been hammered, so they don't have the capital to do those kinds of crazy deals anymore. But they know Wall Street is watching them, so fundamentally they're questioning whether the business model even works if they have to spend that much money on content. All of Netflix's competitors have basically stopped too. This whole frothy environment in Hollywood last year has just been turned off. It hasn't even been turned down to a trickle; it has stopped. So you might think that the massive asset bubble we had last year was just in crypto and growth stocks. It's not. I think it actually trickled down into the real economy, because Netflix is one of those growth stocks, and the money then flowed into writers in Hollywood and lots of other places. This is one small example that this asset bubble wasn't purely localized to crypto. It affects real people in the real economy, and we are just beginning to see the unwind.
My prediction now is that the markets are bottoming and consolidating, and I think this is the time to start nibbling and getting ready to really put money in. There are enough signals every day telling me that, at least on the margin, it's time. The markets do a reasonably good job of digesting news and pricing in the forward reality. Today's price already reflects everything we know, so the real question is what's about to happen in the future. From my perspective I'm starting to get a little constructive. When companies like Facebook really do this, the financial markets have always had what we call the Fed put. What does that mean? A put is essentially the right to sell something. What market participants have known for the last decade is that if things got very hairy, if there was uncertainty in the market, the Federal Reserve would step in and act as a buyer of last resort. So it always eliminated the last part of the true supply-demand balance, because they would just come and say, don't worry.
In many ways, what the big tech companies were was an escalating arms race. You could never really find the true market-clearing price for an engineer, or the true amount you should spend on office space or free services, because there were always these companies. If one company had a massage, the next had gyms and massages and physical therapists, and another had buses to take you to the gyms, massages, and therapists, and the next had freshly made protein shakes. It kept escalating because the costs didn't matter. They wanted, if nothing else, to get that marginal engineer, product manager, or businessperson to work at their company, which eliminated the risk that the person would start something to disrupt them. So when you take this big-tech put out of the market, you get true price discovery. You'll find out what the real price should be for this kind of engineer or that kind of product manager. You'll find out the real expenses you need to bear to build a real, lasting business, and you'll be able to sort through all of that. So I think it's a really good moment, and again it's another indication to me that broadly speaking the markets are starting to stabilize. The irrational behavior is starting to exit the system. The party is in its last few hours: volumes are going down, the alcohol is being taken away, people are hanging around with the lights coming on, thinking they've been here a little too long. I think that's a very healthy process for an economy, and I think that's what's happening right now.
I think this is the end of this phase of big tech, where you had unfettered growth and these business models were largely unassailable. They were really just fighting to grow into their valuations and generate more revenue to justify where they traded. Now comes the next phase, where they have to operate more like cash-cow businesses. It's an acknowledgment that growth is tapering. It's an acknowledgment that they will trade in a fairly tight band in terms of multiples, which means they have to manage expenses much more tightly. That means they can't have a broad surface area in which to operate experiments. You have to keep the experiments small, you have to manage your expenses, and employees can't basically run all over the place. Management has to keep a firm hand on dictating strategy and on what people work on.
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