Starting in 2022 the market can feel like a The train wreck is slowly openingbut there is good news to be found – provided you are willing to take a longer view.
Sure, Startup layoffs are skyrocketing, Venture capital is slowing downand the stock market is a hot mess. Beneath every drumbeat of negativity, however, there’s more to the positive than you might expect. And, extract one more nugget from Battery Venture’s recent quarterly cloud updatethe apocalypse are ignoring history.
So, this beautiful weekend, let’s find sunshine among the clouds. Understood? Clouds. Okay, SaaS dad is no longer joking. Work:
Founders, here’s the good news about software
Good news is a variation on bad news and is often positive thanks to historical comparisons. Sure, this is good news about a type, but all are equally welcome:
- Bad news: Start-up layoffs are on the rise.
- Good news: Much less than in early 2020.
Like Homebrew’s Hunter Walk note recently on his personal blog, the number of startup layoffs reached a local maximum last month, reaching 16,000 and changing, each Layoffs.FYI tracker. Since the same data service recorded zero effective startup layoffs during the Q3-Q4 venture boom, the numbers suck. But! It’s also far less severe than the damage startups suffered in early 2020.
For example, the number of startup employees who were laid off nearly 10,000 in March 2020. And then for many months, they remained hot, with more than 25,000 recorded in both April and May of the same year. . There were only 70 individual startup layoffs recorded by Layoffs.FYI in May 2022, far less than the 100+ events per month recorded between March and May 2020.
Things are worse than they were at the end of 2021 in view of a startup’s layoffs, but we’re barely setting a record here, even just looking at recent data.
- Bad news: Venture capital is slowing down.
- Good news: From the historical record level.
