A top executive from a San Francisco PR firm that visited the O’Dwyer offices recently mentioned the “R” word in describing a solid but hardly riveting tech PR environment, but added that things would be fine if conditions stayed as they current exist. That firm is counting on overseas business (and wishful thinking for the U.S.) to fuel expansion, but the current state is okay.
Firms reporting fees for the O'Dwyer rankings posted impressive growth for 2007, especially in technology, but we're into the second quarter of '08 and a lot may have changed since the '07 books closed.Valley watchers are no doubt poring over the New York Times dispatch from San Francisco today ominously headlined “A Silicon Valley Slowdown.” The Times notes hiring and spending are being done more judiciously and start-up funds are being more frugal with investing, among other bad signs for the tech economy.
Most of the investors, entrepreneurs and innovators who build companies in the Valley do so with the hope of taking them public or selling them — the rainmaking opportunities that people here call exits. But with gloom pervading the financial markets and the business climate, the exits are hard to find.
Valley believers (including PR firms which continue to hire at a steady pace in the Bay Area) are saying things aren’t that bad and convey a belief that gloomy reports are hyped up media projections and not necessarily reality.
One tech PR firm president characterized the current malaise as a “correction” rather than anything approaching recession.
Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch says he’s not sure things are as bad as the Times dispatch, but gives his own laundry list of bad news from the Valley, including “M&A deals and IPOs drying up, slower job growth, signs of weakness on Web advertising , cautious corporate IT spending, and rising costs for companies that offshore their labor force due to the decline of the dollar.”