PE & profitability is tricky because of its short-term nature. PE in tech often comes in as post-VC money to gut everything, including r&d, as part of reselling

PE & profitability is tricky because of its short-term nature. PE in tech often comes in as post-VC money to gut everything, including r&d, as part of reselling/bundling/etc as a more efficient thing at the expense of a growing & innovating thing, and often worse for jobs in the primary host country. When I hear about a PE buyout, my thought is generally not, "oh great, this makes me want to finally work at X, they're serious about growing again!" but "oh no..". As easy early-stage growth tapers, which is typical, the more r&d is needed to figure that out. The company likely still has that in their DNA. But... that also makes it easy to flip the books on margin & profitability by firing all those seasoned product, dev, r&d, etc people, which can easily be 20-40% of the company. Likewise, replace much of the remaining expensive staff with folks not from the home company country. Founders cashing out and PE & replacement CEOs taking over changes a lot. I'm not sure that kind of profitability is all that great from a taxpayer and economics perspective. Replacing cultures of excess and immature management does sound like value... but that is a fig leaf over what is going on in reality. There are similar questions about VC pump-and-dumps also not being good for society, despite similar reasoning. It's a hard topic - I couldn't find it, but Matt Stoller's newsletter on modern anti-monopoly economics & legislation news touches on these areas periodically.