Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.
We’ve been living through a lot of tech history over the past two years, but the brutal Twitter layoffs feel especially sad, complex and exhausting to anyone who follows the industry. We knew it was coming, then we were told it wasn’t, then it most certainly was, then it did. Reports say that half of Twitter’s 7,500 team will lose their jobs.
I don’t have a hot take, or a Musk-related quip about this moment. I just have empathy for the people who lost, or might lose, their jobs after investing time, energy and care in building Twitter. Twitter employees are turning to the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked, a riff on the internal hashtag #LoveWhereYouWork, to thank each other, say goodbye and share the personal news. As one former employee put it …