Silicon Valley Job Losses Ignite Entrepreneurial Spirit

Silicon Valley Job Losses Spark New Wave of Entrepreneurs as Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Snap cut over 150,000 Staff, leading to day one Ventures’ Initiative to fund startups founded by Laid-Off Tech Employees.
Nic Szerman lost his job at Meta Platforms in November, just two months after joining full-time. Days later he was seeking investment for his own company Nulink, a blockchain-based payment company. U.S. tech giants including Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Snap have purged more than 150,000 staff.

While overall venture capital (VC) financing fell 33% globally to about $483 billion in 2022, early-stage funding was robust $37.4 billion raised in angel or seed rounds, in line with the record level seen in 2021, according to data from research firm PitchBook. Day One Ventures has launched an initiative to fund startups founded by people laid off from tech jobs.

The program aims to cut 20 checks for $100,000 by the end of 2022. Day One said it had received over 1,000 applications, most of them from people cut loose by Meta, Stripe, and Twitter. Some investors have compared the current downturn to the dotcom crash of the early 2000s, when dozens of startups went bust.