Report: nearly 70K tech startup employees worldwide have lost jobs since March, including over 25.5K in the San Francisco region
Layoffs among tech startups reflect economic fallout of Covid-19 — Technology startups have been laying off tens of thousands of workers to cope …
Context & Ripple Effects
When trackers began counting in early April, the damage looked contained: an international tracker had found just 16,229 layoffs across 204 startups by mid-April, on top of nearly 4,000 US startup job cuts logged in March. A Startup Genome survey of 45 countries then showed the cuts were systemic, not idiosyncratic — nearly three-quarters of startups had laid off full-time staff.
The Wall Street Journal's new tally makes clear how fast the wave compounded: nearly 70,000 startup employees gone worldwide since March, with more than a third — over 25,500 — concentrated in the San Francisco region alone, the densest startup labor market in the country.
First-order effects
- San Francisco bears a disproportionate share of the pain: over 25,500 of the ~70,000 global startup job losses sit in one metro area, hitting the engineers, recruiters, and operations staff who anchor its startup ecosystem.
- VC-backed startups are cutting deep to preserve runway during the Covid-19 downturn, converting the sector's fastest-growing employers into its fastest-shedding ones within a quarter.
Second-order effects
- A labor market shock this concentrated in San Francisco ripples through the local economy — housing demand, services, and the tax base that funds city government all depend on startup payrolls.
- Displaced startup workers flow toward larger, better-capitalized tech employers or leave the region, shifting hiring power from cash-strapped startups to incumbents able to absorb talent at a discount.
Third-order effects
- The 2020 wave set the template for a recurring cycle: Layoffs.fyi later estimated companies cut around 80,000 tech jobs between March and December 2020, then over 150,000 in 2022 alone, with fresh waves resurfacing in January 2024 and beyond — making layoff tracking itself standing industry infrastructure.
- San Francisco's startup employment base is revealed as structurally cyclical rather than steadily growing, with each downturn larger than the last and geographically concentrated where venture funding concentrates.
The trend: Tech startup employment has become a boom-bust cycle tracked in real time, with each downturn — Covid-19, 2022, and after — cutting deeper than the last and landing hardest on San Francisco.