Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and More Join Industry-Wide Layoff-Fest. Now Here’s Sting

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and More Join Industry-Wide Layoff-Fest. Now Here’s Sting

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2023 is only 3 weeks old, and already, there have been enough layoffs throughout the tech and media industries for news organizations to publish actual round-ups.

Just this past week, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced plans to cut around 6% of its global workforce, after CEO Sundar Pichai explained that he’d hired based on “a different economic reality” than the one facing the company today.


Fellow tech giant Microsoft also announced 10,000 job cuts, making up nearly 5% of its own global workforce. That comes after the company’s 2022 round of layoffs to its consumer R&D division. Their explanation: an attempt to consolidate their staff and save money on office space by creating “higher density across our workspace.”

As if that weren’t painful enough, Amazon this week also announced 18,000 layoffs on its corporate side, among the widest-scale layoffs in the company’s history. One department that will be hit particularly hard is Prime Air, Amazon’s nascent drone delivery system that was a pet project of founder and Jeff Bezos. In a memo to remaining employees, Amazon’s worldwide retail chief Doug Herrington chalked the decision up to “uncertain economic times” and an effort to “improve [the company’s] cost structure.”

If you include Meta dropping 11,000 staffers back in November – around 13% of its total workforce – that means that four of the top five largest tech companies in the world have announced significant layoffs in just the past few months. (Apple remains the lone holdout among the Big Five.)

And the situation isn’t just limited to the largest players in the industry, either. 2023 kicked off with Salesforce announcing cuts to around 10% of its staff, or more than 7,000 employees, as part of a new “measured approach” to a “challenging” economic environment. This week, Vox Media announced plans to lay off 7% of its staff, or around 130 employees, while a plunge in sales will push online furniture retailer Wayfair to cull 1,750 people from its workforce. Plus coworking juggernaut WeWork also announced plans to layoff 300 people on Thursday. According to one estimate, the tech and media industries combined lost around 130,000 jobs in the past 12 months alone.

Though the explanations differ on specifics, for the most part, everyone’s falling back on the same fundamental explanation. The early days of the pandemic boosted activity online – from streaming to ecommerce to telecommunications and beyond – pushing tech companies to adjust and expand their workforces accordingly. More recently, the economic headwinds have shifted, as investors have grown increasingly concerned about a potential recession and a protracted political battle over the “debt ceiling.” This, in turn, has forced companies to rethink their overall strategies and cut costs.

Interest rates also tell part of the story. When interest rates were particularly low, investors found increasing appeal in tech stocks, which offered lower short-term profits but huge future potential and major long-term promises. (Think of companies like Uber and Tesla.) As interest rates increased, and investors sought more immediate returns, these kinds of stocks became less appealing, driving tech companies again toward austerity measures. Additionally, the cratering digital ad market has had a major impact on many tech and media companies, including major players like Google, Amazon, Snap, Netflix, and Meta.

Some questions remain, however, about the dire necessity of such deep cuts on an industry-wide level. To take one specific example, Microsoft earned more than $200 billion in 2022, and committed $69 billion to potentially acquire the video game publisher Activision Blizzard. The company has a market cap of over $1.7 trillion. As TechCrunch points out, the salaries of 10,000 employees are unlikely to have a major overall impact on the company’s bottom line. In a case of deeply unfortunate timing, Microsoft’s layoff news hit just hours after the company paid Sting to perform at an “intimate” event with executives at Davos in Switzerland.

Even without command performances from Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, repeated stories about cuts and tough economic times are almost certain to impact morale among those still working for tech companies. Particularly among younger workers who may be experiencing mass layoffs for the first time. Companies valued in the trillions culling journalists and engineers is a bitter pill to swallow, even if the top story on every technology website wasn’t a consequence-free Sam Bankman-Fried waxing philosophical about his many alleged crimes from the comfort of his parents’ kitchen.


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LA Latino/a Founders On Why Authenticity Matters in Tech

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Latino/a Founders On Why Authenticity Matters in Tech
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

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LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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