Startups are more than just "us tech bros", though. If your company sells a physical product, for example, then you're typically reliant on either warehousing personnel on your own payroll or a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, both of which have been hit hard with COVID-19-related shutdowns. Pickers or packers or forklift drivers can't (usually) do their jobs from home; they need to be onsite at a warehouse to to do their work, and if the warehouse is literally not allowed to let employees in the door because the company is a "non-essential business", then guess who's getting laid off? For companies selling physical products, this threat is existential.

There are lots of startups that sell physical products. I work for one of them. We're doing pretty great for now (we sell, among other things, toilet paper and hand sanitizer / soap and cleaning supplies), but we also recognize that we're lucky, and that luck is unlikely to persist if this "great unwinding" lasts longer than the COVID-19 panic unless we do everything in our power to reduce costs and extend that runway as long as possible with the current tailwind. Most startups selling physical goods ain't so lucky (see also: the ones in the article, even if the article didn't really go into much detail on it).