2020年经济学人 疫情下的硅谷(1)（在线收听）

Business

商业版块

Austerity in Silicon Valley

硅谷的紧缩政策

The next garage

下一个“车库”

The crisis has hit tech’s spiritual home hard, but it is already planning ahead

这场危机严重打击了科技公司的精神家园，但是它已早做打算。

Firing somebody is hard under any circumstances.But doing it over a video call is brutal.“It’s not the best environment for this, with people at home and kids in the background,” observes Marwan Forzley, the boss of Veem,a startup based in San Francisco which allows firms to transfer money cheaply. He recently had to let go 30 of its employees.

无论如何，解雇某人是一件很困难的事。但是通过视频电话来做这件事情很残忍。“这并不是一个适用于解雇的最佳环境，因为家里有人，背景中有孩子，”Veem的老板马尔万·福兹雷这样说道。Veem的总部位于旧金山，允许公司以低廉的成本转移资金。他最近不得不解雇了30名员工。

Mr Forzley speaks for many in Silicon Valley. The largest American tech firms may be the winners from a global pandemic. Demand for their online services has exploded among people and businesses in lockdown. But many startups in tech’s heartland are hurting. Hardly a day goes by without news of more lay-offs and firms going out of business. Yet amid the doom and gloom, venture-capital (vc) firms and entrepreneurs are already doing the thing they believe they do best: divining the future in their crystal balls.

福兹雷先生代表了硅谷的许多人。最大的美国科技公司也许是这场全球疫情的赢家。封锁下，人们和企业对其在线服务的需求呈爆炸式增长。但是科技腹地的许多创业公司正在遭受伤害。几乎每天都会传来更多裁员和公司倒闭的消息。然而尽管前途无望，风险投资公司和企业家们已经在做他们认为自己做的最好的事情：用水晶球预测未来。

Californian tech firms and their financiers were among the first in America to take the threat of coronavirus seriously.Some venture capitalists began refusing to shake hands at the beginning of February (and were ridiculed for it).

加州科技公司和他们的投资者是美国第一批严肃对待冠状病毒威胁的公司。在二月初，一些风险投资家开始拒绝握手（并因此受到嘲笑）。

The moneymen also moved quickly to “triage” companies in their portfolio, classifying them according to how likely they were to survive and what they should do. Mostly this involved letting people go.“The shocking thing is how fast everything has moved,” says Marco Zappacosta, who runs Thumbtack, a marketplace for local professionals from plumbers to dog trainers, which laid off 250 of its 900 employees.

这些投资人也迅速开始将自己投资组合中的公司进行“情况鉴别分类”，根据他们存活的可能性以及应该做的事情给他们归类。通常，这也包括辞退别人。Thumbtack的运营者马尔科·扎帕科斯塔表示“一切变化的如此的快，太令人震惊了”。Thumbtack是一个面向本地专业人士的市场，从水管工到训狗师，该公司解雇了900名员工中的250个员工。

Definitive figures are hard to come by.When big firms cut back it makes the news.Airbnb and Uber recently announced they would let go 1,900 and 3,700 workers respectively.Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks dismissals in the tech industry by adding up numbers from press reports, has counted about 17,600 jobs lost since mid-March.But this misses many sackings at smaller startups.Although still well below the national average and the peak during the financial crisis of 2007-09, unemployment in the region is edging up.

权威数字很难得到。当大公司削减开支时，这就成了新闻。爱彼迎和优步最近宣布它们会各自解雇1900名员工和3700名员工。Layoffs.fyi是一家通过统计新闻报道中的数字来追踪科技行业的裁员情况，在三月中旬以来，该公司已经统计了约17600人失业。但是这一数据缺失了许多小型创业公司的裁员数据。尽管该地区的失业率仍远低于全国平均失业率，以及2007-09年金融危机期间的失业率峰值，但他仍在缓慢上升。