Why Tech is Deflationary in an Inflationary World: Matt Brockman speaks to David Toms
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What does Satya Nadella mean by “Tech is deflationary in an inflationary world?”
There's a a beautiful expression from Microsoft recently, I think it was from Satya Nadella himself, which was that Tech is deflationary in an inflationary world. We are providing the tools to help people keep to manage their costs to avoid some of the aspects of inflation that otherwise cause pain. Just like 50 years ago, buying machinery and automating your factories was deflationary in an inflationary environment. Software is that from the modern world.
Hello everyone and welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series, where we talk to leaders and innovators from across the software and technology ecosystem discussing the key trends changing how we all do business. I'm Matthew Brockman, managing partner at HG, and today I'm talking to HG's head of tech research, David Toms, Tomsy, to discuss some of the key trends we're seeing in the software sector over the last quarter. So, David, we're sat here at the end of March. It's been slightly eventful, I'd say, probably key in the public markets the last six months. What would you call out as the kind of key trend lines, the key things we've seen over that period?
I think the biggest thing we've seen is an unwinding, I suppose, of of the growth trade, if I can call it that, which is that if you go back to just pre-pandemic and then certainly the first year of the pandemic world, 2020 to mid 2021. Essentially, investors were very, very excited by growth in any form. I think because it became so rare for a period of time because most companies were struggling so much. And there were a number of other factors potentially at play as well, around stimulus checks and the retail market getting involved and so on. But but broadly what we saw for that period was it didn't really matter what the economics of your business were, it just mattered how fast it was growing.
And what that drove was a sort of a massive valuation expansion in all kinds of stocks, led more by the growth and the excitement around their story than necessarily about their underlying economics. And basically we've seen a reversal of that. It it probably started sometime around spring last year, but there's been an acceleration of that in the latter part of last year and the first quarter of
this year. So you're seeing the effect of essentially money no longer being free. And so businesses with models that haven't really proven out customer economics and how they would scale are at risk of no longer being funded or or seeing a real significance for shift in value.
Yes, exactly. If you look at unprofitable companies, broadly unprofitable software and services companies have seen their EV to sales multiple halves over the last 12 months. That's a pretty big change in sentiment. And I think one of the big challenges for the public markets rather than for the world we exist in, but for the public markets is you actually have very little to go on. You've got the statutory reporting, and then on top of that, you've got what management wants to tell you. I sort of used to describe it when I was an analyst in the olden days as being like, trying to solve a hundred-piece jigsaw where the regulator says the 10 pieces you have to be given, management get to choose another five pieces they might or might not show you, and you've got to work out what the picture looks like after that.
And yeah, that's pretty tough job. I think, you know, a key difference to our world is we do get to see the entire jigsaw set, or at least the vast majority of it.
And just to put you on the spot for a second, I'll bring us back to private markets a second.
How did the growth‑trade unwind and why are investors now focusing on earnings?
Do you do you sense some of those public stocks are oversold? Would you, I mean, not a market we're in, but do you sense some of those higher growth sort of public public stocks are, you know, there's there's there's value there?
Yes, when we look now at overall valuations in the market, there's definitely some that look quite interesting. In fact, I'll use an analogy if you if you rewind to a period that you and I are both old enough to remember, which is the 2000-2001 dot com crash, from March 2000 to September 2001, pretty much every dot com stock fell by about 90%.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does Satya Nadella mean by “Tech is deflationary in an inflationary world?”
0:00–3:07
2
How did the growth‑trade unwind and why are investors now focusing on earnings?
3:07–5:43
3
Why have unprofitable software companies seen their EV‑to‑sales multiples halve?
5:43–8:53
4
Are any high‑growth public tech stocks now oversold and worth buying?
8:53–11:56
5
What can we learn from the dot‑com crash about today’s tech valuations?
11:56–16:06
6
How does hardware cost deflation (Moore’s law) make software investments more affordable?
16:06–20:38
7
What macro trends give HG confidence to keep investing in automation and software?
20:38–22:42
Speakers
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