I work at Stripe. I can’t throw a proverbial paper clip at this company without hitting someone who could be founding a company right now. There’s no way to lay off 14% of Stripe without setting free scores of future founders.

hubris of tech workers. as if starting successful companies is just that easy

It’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing.

If you somehow forced someone to sit and practice drawing a hand for eight hours a day, they would get surprisingly far as an artist.

Being a founder isn’t too dissimilar. Determination tends to be decisive.

If you spent eight hours a day trying to make a small group of users love you, you’d get surprisingly far.

I think that’s what they mean about potential founders at Stripe. There’s a lot of potential energy that a layoff might release.

my guess is that most, if not nearly all, successful founders were pulled into that position (i.e. self-directed) vs pushed out of desperation.

I'm not sure about that.

Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company

If you were that risk averse (that you didn’t act on your entrepreneurial instincts) when times were good, my money is that you’re more likely to double down in searching for safety.

I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)

A lot of entrepreneurs' personal stories start off with a setback like this last couple of weeks have imparted upon thousands of people

I'll bet a lot of those "low performers" just had a hard time jumping through hoops at the circus, but will do just fine out on the savannah

This is the "live laugh love" of the Bay Area.

> It’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing.

Is this supposed to mean anything at all?

I feel exactly the same. I would love to run my own tiny company, but it looks very tough to bootstrap. Everytime I hear someone say it is easy, I cringe.

Uber for cats will rise again!

OP isn't saying it's "easy". They are pointing out that forming a startup is achievable by a small (scores = several 20s ~= 60-100) number of people impacted.

Imagine thinking that starting a new company is a bad idea. It might not be easy, but the engine of progress is the birth of new firms, not the monopolization of markets through a handful of them. The vast majority of jobs are provided by small to medium-sized businesses, not companies like Twitter or Stripe. This is particularly true in Europe, but it's quite universal. We need new companies, even if some fail (or even most).

Not necessarily… a potential good startup founder is not necessarily a skill set that a FB needs right now. And many business ideas that aren’t “FB-scale ideas” can still be quite successful for a small founding crew.

Not necessarily. There may be business opportunities that Meta, Twitter and Stripe are not interested in.

That’s right—-any time you’re laying off thousands people at once, some of them will the “the wrong people”. There is no mechanism for mass layoffs that can accurately target only “low performers”. Even if these layoffs reflect good decisions, good decisions at corporate scale are not necessarily good decisions at the individual level.

Let's hope so