Tech stocks have been hit over the past month – but one CEO of a newly-public tech company isn’t worried about the recent volatility.
In a CNBC interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Tuesday, SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie said he is confident his company, which went public at the end of September, will withstand turbulence in the tech sector. Shares of SurveyMonkey, a provider of survey software products, surged in their debut on the NASDAQ but have been on a rollercoaster ride since, down 34 percent since its IPO.
“The stock market, I think, in the long term is a weighting machine, in the short term it’s a voting machine,” Lurie said. “I think we’re resilient and going to endure the day-to-day volatility but we know that long term value creation is built through consistent delivery and results.”
Lurie said he “looks forward” to sharing SurveyMonkey’s first quarterly earnings report next week. But he warned of broader concerns in the tech sector.
“I do think that technology is under duress a bit now,” he said. “Technology companies have become so large in terms of their size and scale and their representation in market cap.”
Lurie said tech companies need to focus on winning back user trust. SurveyMonkey released new data Tuesday saying brand trust plays a role in the purchasing decisions of 92 percent of Americans and 89 percent of U.K. residents.
“If you’re really listening and understanding and asking the right questions and using that data well, your company is going to be in a good position to compete,” Lurie said.
SurveyMonkey responds to 20 million answers every day on its platforms and generates revenue as a subscription service. Lurie called Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) an “important breakthrough” when it comes to protecting customer data, adding SurveyMonkey is compliant with the law.
“For companies that are not really in tune with what’s important to their customers around privacy, I think they are going to be disrupted,” he said.
Tech stocks have sunk around 10 percent in just one month. All the biggest tech stocks suffered big losses in October, led by Amazon‘s 20 percent decline and Alphabet‘s 9.7 percent drop. Investors pulled away from the stocks that have delivered the best returns in recent years, as concerns about President Trump’s trade war and rising interest rates sent fund managers into assets that are perceived as safer should the economy.
