It's good news for thousands of laid-off employees from Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and others as a US-based venture capital (VC) firm is ready to absorb the sacked workforce flooding the American labour market after a massive retrenchment by the big tech majors of late.
Day One Ventures, the VC company, has said that it would pump in $1,00,000 (around Rs 81 lakh) in 20 entities started by people who have been sacked recently and six months later, add $ 1 million (about Rs 8.13 crore) in the ones with the most traction, according to a report in Tech Crunch.
It is a classic case of one company’s redundancy could be another firm’s reward, particularly for tech startups. The VC will allocate $5 million (and at most $10 million) from its $52.5 million fund to help the sacked employees from tech behemoths such as Amazon, Meta and Twitter.
The company plans to transfer the first round of funds by the end of this year as part of the programme called “Funded Not Fired”.
Masha Bucher, founder of Day One Ventures, mentioned that at least 0.1 percent to 1 percent of the thousands of employees affected by tech layoffs this year would become incredible founders.
She emphasised that the programme is “not charity” and but a serious proposal, adding that folks from Stripe and Twitter would not get preferential treatment in the pitching round.
Bucher told CNBC Make It: “VC investors are sitting on billions of dollars, and now we have thousands of talented people in engineering, salespeople, support staff and other functions looking for new job opportunities — so why not direct some of this money towards them?.”
As per several media reports, the programme received more than 500 applicants within the first 48 hours of launching.
Born and raised in Russia, Bucher came to the US in 2014 and started M&A PR studio, which worked as a publicity campaigner for clients including Houzz, HotelTonight and WeWork among other tech companies.
On Tuesday, the Jeff Bezos-controlled online marketplace, Amazon, joined a bandwagon of big US tech firms making deep cuts to their workforce base to deal with a potential economic slump. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said it would slash more than 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce, to cut costs.
