Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The departure of the management sent an intriguing signal.

If you follow the movements of major US technology companies, you may find that an undercurrent is surging in many companies recently, with a large number of senior executives, especially CFOs, announcing their departures.

This is an unusual sign for the US technology sector as a whole: changes in corporate executives, especially CFO and CEO, tend to be more sensitive and eye-catching than layoffs or departmental changes to ordinary employees. As these two roles often have a comprehensive understanding of the business and financial situation of the enterprise, their departure generally sends a bad signal to the outside world.

In recent months, some senior executives of US technology companies have left one after another, casting a shadow over the already winter market.

| with the advent of cold winter, CFO with a good sense of smell are the first to "run" CFO to control the financial power of a company, which is generally directly related to the company's financial security and development prospects. As the think-tank of CEO, CFO has an irreplaceable voice in the company. Many companies will hire experienced CFO to help promote their financial expansion or listing, and CFO is often the highest-paid position among company executives after CEO.

As of September, the median base salary of CFO in the United States was $362000, while the median total salary after bonuses and benefits reached $506000, according to Salary.com.

The salary of CFO from many large technology companies in Salary.com is quite staggering. For example, Google poached Ruth-Porat from Morgan Stanley as CFO in 2015 for a signing fee of $5 million, and Google promised that the CFO would receive a total of $70 million within two years. Before that, Snap hired Tim Stone, Amazon's vice president of finance, as CFO and offered an annual salary of $500000 plus a sky-high price of $20 million.

As the person in charge of the financial information of listed companies with important financial information that has not been disclosed, CFO's decision to leave is probably due to the fact that the company is aware of the major financial risks that the enterprise will face in the future, and makes a sudden departure decision in order to evade risks, avoid responsibility and other considerations. As a result, the recent frequent departures of CFO, an American technology company, have particularly alarmed the market. Recently, many American companies, especially some technology-based growth companies, have reported the news of CFO leaving one after another.

Brian Roberts, chief financial officer of OpenSea, the world's largest integrated NFT trading platform, announced his departure earlier this month, just 10 months after he announced his appointment at the end of last year. Previously, Brian Roberts served as chief financial officer of Lyft for seven years and helped Lyft complete each round of financing and listing.

Picture from Bloomberg the role of Brian Roberts has changed from CFO of the company to consultant of Opensea. Brian Roberts's resignation may also confirm once again that the current situation of Opensea is not optimistic.

So far this year, the business level of Opensea has shrunk severely. According to DappRadar, a NFT market research firm, in the past 30 days, OpenSea's transaction volume was only about $250 million, down 90% from $2.5 billion in December last year. Its NFT sales totaled $3.4 billion in the third quarter, compared with $12.5 billion in the first quarter of this year.

In addition, the management level of the company is also turbulent. Opensea had previously announced up to 20 per cent layoffs, and in addition to Brian Roberts's recent departure, Ryan Foutty, vice president of business development, recently said he had left Opensea.

Opensea trading data, picture from DappRadar such business difficulties not only occurred to Opensea, technology finance, as the hardest hit by the recent valuation decline, but also reported the news of CFO's departure.

Last week, Brex, a Silicon Valley commercial credit card giant valued at $12.3 billion at the start of the year, announced 11% layoffs and confirmed the imminent departure of its chief financial officer, Adam Swiecicki.

Brex was one of the most successful startups YC has hatched in recent years, and its founder, Henrique Dubugras, is arguably the most high-profile young man in Silicon Valley: he founded his first fintech company at 16, sold it to Stanford three years later, dropped out of school and started again six months later, and founded Brex at 22, which has raised $1.2 billion so far.

But at the moment when the tide of financial technology is declining, it is difficult for Brex to be alone. Brex announced in June that it would stop serving traditional small businesses and shifted its focus to a new product, Empower, to help early-stage startups scale up, followed by news of massive layoffs.

In addition to financial technology, news of CFO's departure has also been reported in the areas of new energy and self-driving, which are undergoing drastic adjustments. On Wednesday, Faraday announced that its interim CFO Becky Roof had resigned with immediate effect, and said the company had made layoffs and pay cuts in exchange for equity, cost-cutting and cash savings.

The picture is from Yahoo Finance, in addition to the three companies recently announced by CFO, according to incomplete statistics from Silicon Star, other companies that have left CFO in recent months include Paypal, Silicon Valley big data Splunk, Blue Apron, the largest food distribution platform in the United States, and Noom, a health management platform.

| some CEO and executives are also restless. In addition to CFO, the management of some American companies is also changing dramatically. Many of these founders and CEO are also joining the wave of departures.

Last week, CEO Rowan Trollope of Five9, a listed cloud software company, resigned, causing Five9's shares to tumble 25 per cent on the day. As a communications service provider that stood out in the epidemic, Zoom offered to buy all shares worth $14.7 billion to Five9 in mid-2021, but Five9 was in the midst of a rising trend and felt the price was too low and finally rejected Zoom.

However, since the share price peaked in August 2021, the value of Five9 has fallen by more than 70 per cent and now has a market capitalization of less than $4 billion.

The picture is from the Rowan Trollope Twitter account. In addition, the turmoil in the encryption field is also reflected in the departure of CEO and the founder.

At the end of last month, CEO Alex Mashinsky of Celsius, an encrypted lending platform embroiled in the bankruptcy crisis of Sanjian Capital, announced its departure. Just a week after he left, S. Daniel Leon, Celsius's co-founder and chief strategy officer, tendered his resignation to the company last week.

As recently as July, Celsius applied to the court for bankruptcy protection because of its high debt, with a balance sheet deficit of $1.19 billion and about 23000 outstanding loans to retail borrowers, totaling $411 million.

In real estate technology, Better.com, a start-up that lost thousands of jobs with Zoom "violence" a few months ago, has almost finished with its executives in recent months.

The company's vice president of communications, director of public relations and head of marketing, Chinese CTO Diane Yu all resigned after the layoffs at Zoom. In the past two years, Better.com has developed very rapidly, with nearly 10 rounds of financing, with investors including Softbank Corp., Goldman Sachs, Amex and other top institutions, with a valuation of up to $7.7 billion.

Better.com is scheduled to go public this year. But in view of the current mass turnover of executives, this goal is almost impossible to achieve.

| the US capital market is going through the worst period in 20 years. The exodus of corporate executives may have a lot to do with the current cold winter in the US capital market.

As the Fed continues to raise interest rates aggressively, the risk of recession increases. Valuations of a large number of startups continue to plummet, with the Nasdaq 100 down more than 30% so far this year and the s & p 500 down more than 20%. The valuation of American companies has halved and their ankles are innumerable, which has also increased the financial and operational risks of many companies.

The picture comes from Google except for the collapse of the capital market, and the data show that this year's IPO in the United States has basically stagnated completely. According to the statistics of Dealogic, the amount of IPO financing of US stocks is only about 7 billion US dollars so far this year, which is close to the lowest level in 30 years.

According to the Global IPO Trends report for the second quarter of 2022 released by Ernst & Young, the number of IPO and financing volume of the two major US exchanges, the NASDAQ Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, fell sharply by 75 per cent and 94 per cent respectively in the first half of 2022 compared with the same period in 2021. Private equity seems to be trying to avoid this year's IPO market.

IPO in the United States has been active since 2009. The picture is from Factset at the beginning of this year. Many people are looking forward to the American technology IPO market in 2022. Because this year, there could have been a number of tech start-ups worth more than 10 billion yuan to go public, including hundreds of billions of digital payment company Stripe, cross-border e-commerce Shein, and 10 billion-level online community Reddit, game developer Epic Games, grocery distribution platform Instacart, Intel's autopilot project Mobileye, financial technology company Klarna, online trading market and sports shoes and clothing distributor StockX and so on.

But so far, only Mobileye has submitted an IPO application for these closely watched listed companies, and the entire US stock market has been nearly 250 days since the last listing of large technology stocks with more than $50 million, setting a new record for the longest time in nearly 20 years.

Even if they go public against the wind, these companies are not performing well. In the second quarter of this year, the top 10 IPO in the US stock market totaled just $2.5 billion, but that figure was as high as $25.8 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.

Analysis shows that the downturn in the entire US technology market will continue at least until the end of this year. The US market seems to be experiencing its worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.

Note: the cover image is from unsplash. Author Nick Fewings, if you don't agree to use it, please contact us as soon as possible and we will delete it immediately.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Silicon Man (ID:guixingren123), Wen | Juny Editor | VickyXiao

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