When the great business cycle mandala turns and Wall Street puts away its yellow flag, the companies that let go of their talent will find themselves playing catchup. They will spend millions of dollars to restaff their ranks of recruiters, and those new scouts will spend many millions more to attract new employees.
But those companies may find they have fearsome new competition. Where do you think the people who lost jobs in 2022 are going to find work? Every Big Tech company seems to be either laying people off or refraining from hiring new ones. The obvious opportunity is joining a startup. If you have a great idea about how to take advantage of the ever-upward arrow of tech progress, there’s never been a better opportunity to snag talented people to help you build your dream.
millions of dollars at any hoodie-shrouded Stanford grad with a laptop and a Github account, but the discipline required when seed rounds are more modest will help toughen those businesses for the long run.—Google, being a prime example, launched in 1998, just before the dotcom bust. Expect these current layoffs to add a new volume to that legacy. By the end of this decade, some of those new ventures will be among the most valuable in the economy.
After the dotcom bubble was reduced to soap scum, cynics took to calling its epicenter “Death Valley.” Venture capitalists switched from free-spending Medicis to Scrooge McDucks . Acres of office space, once harder to find than elbow room on a microchip, are going begging, and unemployment has reached Dust Bowl proportions. No. 3 in the Bay Area best-seller list? A book called “Dot.Con.”