It’s not poor leadership, just misaligned incentives presented by speculators to executives. Before the market started sliding a year ago, Wall Street and private investors were valuing companies at crazy multiples on revenue (avg 22x for most SaaS companies, some much higher) which incentivized topline revenue growth at all costs, even if the company was losing money.

Now, the market has aligned much more strongly with EBITDA and profits which requires companies to rebalance their P&Ls to post profits or at the very least, break-evens.

You could blame the leadership of these companies for not seeing this coming, or you could blame the incentives in the market these leaders observed. However, given the fed’s aggressive monetary policy over the last few years, I’d blame them much more for kicking the can down the road than I’d blame corporate leadership.

If it’s poor leadership, then this economy is rife with poor leadership. The fact is that most tech companies are, at best, stopping hiring.