Tech giants, such as Meta, Amazon, Twitter, and more, may have cut more than 240,000 employees in the last year, but it's not all bad news – a new study reveals the mass layoffs may have generated the latest wave of tech startup entrepreneurs.
The June research by the marketing and e-commerce news outlet BizReport was carried out by examining the Linkedin profiles of thousands of laid-off individuals.
BizReport said it launched the study in an effort to find out what happened to the “layoff victims” after the mass job cuts.
While some of the individuals sought new employment, other former tech employees choose to be their own boss, the study found.
More than 147,299 workers at US-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts since the start of 2023, according to statistics by Crunchbase.
And that’s besides the more than 93,000 jobs slashed from US tech companies in 2022, the data shows.
So where did the thousands of former employees go? For every 100 people who lost their jobs, thirteen have started their own companies, the BizReport study revealed.
And, from all Big Tech companies, ex-Meta employees happened to generate the most startups from recent layoffs, it said.
In fact, one out of every three former employees axed from Meta decided to start their own businesses following their departure from the tech company.
Following Meta, other companies with more than 15% of their former workers launching their own startups included DoorDash at 30%, Amazon at 25%, and the global logistics platform Flexport at 24%.
To round out the top five, 16% of Elon Musk’s former Twitter workforce and 15% of Shopify ex-employees are now running their own startups.
BizReport statistics also show that roughly 44% of the new companies examined in the study were founded by former managers and directors.
Software engineers were also more likely to start their own companies after being laid off.
Nine out of 100 startups were found to have been established by former software engineers, according to the study.
BizReport said it ran the study through a bit of old fashioned detective work.
It first collected the names of laid-off employees from lists compiled by the job loss tracking website layoffs.fyi.
Once it had the list, it went to each fired individual's LinkedIn profile "to see if they became founders, presidents, or business owners after losing their jobs."
Layoffs.fyi lists over 1800 tech companies between 2022 and 2023 that have laid off employees.
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