Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

No shit Sherlock.

If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually.

The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.

good luck getting funding

I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke."

FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.

Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hints of start ups rising to do this, like OpenAI challenging search and Shopify testing the waters of it's own fulfillment network).

It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.

From my view as someone hiring at startups, I feel like I'm seeing the best flow for candidates at all positions than I've see in 20 years.