Laid-off tech workers could get help launching startups with these professional lifelines

Tech companies have been thinning their ranks with mass layoffs in recent weeks. Twitter, recently acquired by Elon Musk, laid off thousands of employees (with potential legal ramifications), and is setting the stage to clear out even more by demanding employees appear back in offices. Further, Meta notified 13% of its workforce that their positions were being terminated. Other firms from Redfin to Lyft to Intel are also cutting jobs.

In all, it means that an influx of tech workers will hit the labor market in the coming weeks and months with the economy already standing on shaky ground. Fortunately for those workers, some organizations are throwing out professional lifelines.

One such lifeline is the “Funded Not Fired” program, launched last week by venture capital firm Day One Ventures, which is looking to tap into the scores of talented-but-newly-jobless tech workers who may be ready to launch startups of their own. After seeing Stripe cut 14% of its workforce earlier this month, Day One founder Masha Bucher says she “saw Twitter ready to lose thousands, and thought that there was no way there weren’t a few great founders in there somewhere.”

So she launched Funded Not Fired, which will invest seed funding of $100,000 in 20 founders in the coming weeks, and next year will choose the top performers from the initial cohort and invest another $1 million in each. 

“Not everyone is founder material, but at least 0.1%-1% could make good founders,” Bucher says.

She notes that the program received more than 500 applicants within the first 48 hours of launching, and has garnered interest from many laid-off workers from Stripe, Twitter, and Meta. Interestingly enough, she says, an announcement she made on LinkedIn has also gotten a lot of attention from employees at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—which have not recently announced layoffs. At least not yet. (Amazon is reportedly planning to lay off workers as soon as this week, according to the New York Times.)

Funded Not Fired isn’t the only program that’s recently launched in the midst of the great tech culling. In September, Barclays announced its Rise Start-Up Academy Special Edition and has reopened applications following the recent wave of layoff announcements. The program’s first cohort comprises 16 startup teams and has similar goals: finding and funding talented would-be founders who find themselves afloat after being laid off. 

“Our long history of innovation has shown us that some of the most successful founders are creative and passionate about leaving things better than they find them, which directly aligns to our innovation mindset,” Sonal Lakhani, global head of fintech innovation programs and strategic initiatives at Barclays, said in a statement provided to Fast Company. “We want to give aspiring entrepreneurs impacted by this recent wave of layoffs an opportunity to build the future of tomorrow and come on a journey with us as we deliver next-generation products for the millions of customers and clients we serve.”

Also worth noting: The Barclays program is free to join, and prospective founders are not required to give up any equity. As for the Day One Ventures program, Bucher says founders don’t even need to have a startup idea in mind before applying—the firm is merely looking for interesting and smart would-be entrepreneurs.

According to Bucher, it’s important for workers to remember that “being fired is not the end of the world—in fact, it opens up opportunities.” With so much talent now untethered, she says, there is a wealth of opportunities for investors, too. “For an investor, you feel like a kid in a candy store.”