Advice for laid-off technologists, fintech flops, how to build a growth team • TechCrunch

by James · February 14, 2023

Image credit: DianeBentleyRaymond/Getty Images

Many technology workers have never experienced a job market like this.

Losing your job unexpectedly is more than a financial shock. Many of us invest much of our identity in what we do, which means layoffs can change our social and emotional lives overnight.

Cutting your spending and polishing your LinkedIn page is the right move, but investors tell me now is still a good time to launch a startup.

The fact that you’ve just been laid off from a startup proves that you have a tolerance for risk. How much are you willing to bet on yourself?

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Depending on where you worked and what you did, you may already have the experience investors are looking for when it comes to achieving product-market fit and solving technical problems.

I surveyed six seed and early-stage investors to get their tactical advice for laid-off tech workers considering a startup. Most of them were so open to receiving notices that they said we could include their contact information.

Each shared details about what kind of deals they are looking for right now and indicated how they prefer to be approached with pitches.

Here’s who I spoke to:

Rex Salisbury, Partner, Cambrian Ventures
Christine Tsai, CEO and Founder, 500 Global
Anna Barber, partner, M13
Dr. Galym Imanbayev, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Deena Shakir, General Partner, Lux Capital
Stephanie Palmeri, Partner, NextView Ventures

Thank you so much for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editor-in-Chief, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

Table of Contents

10 years of fintech failures: 5 innovations that didn’t live up to the hype

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The tech industry, and the media that covers it, thrives on hype cycles.

Sometimes relentless cheerleading can bear fruit: Clumsy personal digital assistants from the 1990s evolved into sleek smartphones a decade later.

And other times, what seemed like a revolutionary idea turns out to be someone trying to start a fad. (If you remember Google Barge, Juicero, or iSmell, let me know.)

Looking back on the past decade, Grant Easterbrook summarizes five fads in fintech that flopped and the underlying factors that prevented them from changing fintech “in the way the founders originally intended.”

A Black YC alum explains how he raised $107 million

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Black entrepreneurs face a unique set of challenges, but Captain founder Demetrius Gray raised $107 million after his Y Combinator experience.

“People see the headline ‘$107 million raised.’ What they don’t really understand is that it was a progressive process of building relationships over time that made it possible,” Gray says.

In an interview, he broke down his fundraising strategy and shared several tactics for connecting with investors.

“You have to get social; you have to get out in front of people and start building relationships.”

Building a growth marketing team the right way

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For his latest TC+ column, growth expert Jonathan Martinez explains how to scale up a marketing team that supports “core growth pillars” like lifecycle marketing, paid acquisition and SEO.

“As startups grow, so do their marketing budgets and the rigorous testing required,” he writes. “Anything that calls for more defined team structures.”

Drawing on his experiences at companies like Coinbase and Postmates, Martinez breaks down the workload for individual team members and identifies key hires like designers and data scientists who can complement their efforts.

On the journey to series B, strategy is more important than calculations

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If all goes well, the funds raised in a Series A will last long enough to allow you to generate steady income. But all is not well.

SaaS entrepreneurs are under pressure to maintain growth and achieve profitability while preserving runway, but these goals are not diametrically opposed, according to Ophelia Brown and Imran Ghory of Blossom Capital.

“Forget planning your business based on the metrics of the last decade,” they write. “We live in a new world order.”

In this article, they take on three questions that face every software startup: