A disheartening era
Man…it’s exhausting, disheartening, saddening, frustrating and more to see these layoff numbers. According to Layoffs.fyi we’re at 211k+ people let go in ’23. Q1 of this year alone saw more people laid off in the startup/tech sector than all of ’22 combined. Emphasis here is that despite the clean, precise statistical nature of large numbers such as these, these are, in fact, people. People with families, rent payments, student debt, auto loans…and those expenses don’t just stop when someone’s laid off.
The great reckoning of over-inflated valuations and subsequent cram downs/recaps (thanks, VC), cost of capital (thanks, Fed and risk averse debt providers), cost of labor (thanks, BigCo), pressure to achieve more efficiency with unreasonable simultaneous growth at public companies (thanks, fickle shareholders) and any number of other secular trends is here.
It blows my mind to see companies that I thought of as untouchable and core to the internet and startup ecosystem on this list of layoffs: New Relic, Inc., Zapier, Shopify, LinkedIn, Unity, Amplitude, and on and on… and that doesn’t include the Lyft’s, Uber’s, ZipRecruiter’s, Electronic Arts (EA), Hulu, and hundreds of other consumer-facing products we love and use daily.
It’s a lot.
My hope, as an eternal optimist, is this is a moment of flames that leads to a phoenix of growth to follow. Tons of talented people out in the world together looking for new opportunities and finding one another.
