Bash pong
Brian Chia of Slalom won the expert bracket ping-pong championship at the 5th Annual GeekWire Bash in March. (Kevin Lisota / GeekWire)

If you want to track the ups and downs of the technology industry, follow the bouncing ball back to ping-pong tables in Silicon Valley. That’s the focus of a new report in The Wall Street Journal, which looked at whether a drop in table sales signaled a pop in the tech bubble.

The Journal spoke to Simon Ng, owner of Billiard Wholesale, a supplier of ping-pong tables to companies such as Twitter as well as startups around the region. Ng said last year the first quarter was hot for table sales, and this year there has been a “general slowdown.”

In the first quarter of 2016, Ng’s table sales to companies fell 50 percent from the prior quarter, the Journal reported. In that period, U.S. startup funding dropped 25 percent according to Dow Jones VentureSource, which tracks venture financing.

The Journal calls the table-tennis indicator a peek into Silicon Valley culture, and certainly that culture is evident at startups and established tech companies in Seattle and elsewhere.

The annual GeekWire Bash is a prime example of the sport’s popularity in Seattle among the tech workforce. Players who hone their sills at work get a chance to compete for local bragging rights in a tournament that this year attracted more than 200 entrants.

Bash
The GeekWire Bash attracted 1,500 attendees this year, with a variety of games including ping pong, dodgeball, foosball, cornhole, beer pong, Sumo wrestling and more. (Kevin Lisota / GeekWire)

“If you don’t have a ping-pong table, you’re not a tech company,” said Sunil Rajasekar, chief technology officer at Lithium Technologies, a San Francisco software startup.

Ng further revealed to the Journal which companies have stopped buying tables as his sales fell to the lowest point since he started keeping track in 2014. But he said he wouldn’t invest based on ping-pong table sales.

“I think it tracks but not predicts it,” Ng said.

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