Start-Ups Are Pummeled in the ‘Great Unwinding’

Now they were being laid off over video calls.

At Bird, the Los Angeles scooter start-up, which had once been valued at as much as $2.5 billion, hundreds of employees were invited to a video conference call on Friday morning with just an hour’s notice. On the call, the voice of an unidentified executive explained that their jobs had been eliminated. A slide outlined the terms: a month of severance pay, three months of medical benefits and one year to exercise their stock options.

The workers were asked to mail in their laptops, said Jenny Alvauaje, a Bird data analyst who was on the call. Some workers missed the call but learned they had been laid off when they lost access to internal systems shortly after, she said.

In a statement that called the layoffs “a difficult decision,” a Bird spokeswoman added, “We purposefully and intentionally did not have any video on to protect privacy as we delivered the news live to individuals.”

The end was equally abrupt for Nik Buenning, 40, a data scientist at Panoramic, a marketing software start-up in Los Angeles. He was just settling into his work-from-home setup on March 23 when a companywide email said to expect a call from human resources.

Right away, he said, “people started sending Slack messages like, ‘I’m out.’ ‘I’m out.’ ‘I’m out.’” An hour later, he was out, too.

Mr. Buenning signed up for Upstream, a new networking app that unveiled itself earlier than planned to cater to tech workers affected by coronavirus layoffs. Sites like Silver Lining are also helping people connect with companies that are still hiring.

Many start-up workers have added their names to Google spreadsheets, which recruiters share in weekly newsletters like Layoff List, created by a recruiting company called Drafted. Hiring managers, venture capitalists and start-up advisers read the newsletter, said Vinayak Ranade, chief executive of Drafted.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/virus-start-ups-pummeled-layoffs-unwinding.html