Crumbling tech dreams

The journey from boom to busts can be rather quick, as we Pakistanis know all too well. However, in the last couple of years, the tech industry has also come to this realisation after a long period of what seemed like reality-defying invincibility at one point. From $648.6 billion of venture capital in 2021, global fundraising went to $248.4bn in 2023, marking a strong correction in the market. And that entirely changed how companies operated, or more aptly, went back to how they have always operated: to make profits. Far too many times, I have heard founders talk about how their maverick accounting — with all those adjusted earnings or margins calculated on the gross merchandise value instead of revenue — wasn’t intellectual dishonesty but rather indicative of a new age which the boring old school indicators just couldn’t capture. Once, an engineer of a well-funded startup argued that in tech, profitability is a thing of a bygone era and just doesn’t matter anymore.