good luck getting funding
money is simultaneously shifting to early stage
it's a double whammy
Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
21–30 of 346 posts
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is. Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#23This happened when BlackBerry laid off staff in Waterloo, Ontario. With a decade’s hindsight, it was exceptionally positive for the local economy.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#24good luck getting funding
This is what I've seen talking to startups. Lots of seed round companies needing to build up a team fast to try to secure a series A before it's too late. Most of them completely insane (with occasional good ones in there) with ideas that clearly have no reasonable profit model. It's undoubtably a great time for startups to get talent, but startups as we know them today tend to be very hungry for VC money, which is d…
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Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#25No 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.
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…
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.
These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform.
The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#27I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants fo…
Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.
Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved.
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#28I imagine severance packages are a big factor here. People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
> plus health insurance through Cobra.
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#29Good. 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 hi…
99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server.
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
#30I imagine severance packages are a big factor here. People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
> plus health insurance through Cobra. Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it…
The companies (at least Meta/Google) are paying the full cost of healthcare for 6 months, at zero cost to those laid off.