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Tech jobs, venture studios and the case for slowing down
The future of innovation is global. We discuss it here.
Where are tech jobs going?
It has been three years since the pandemic forced the global tech community to go remote. The news more recently is seemingly dominated by equal part job cuts and mandated return to office strategies.
So, where are tech jobs going? No crystal ball is available, but I will make four overlapping observations:
The job cuts continue, and I suspect we are not yet done.
Over 58,000 jobs have been cut so far in 2023. This is not just startups. Many large caps like Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others are in the mix. The narrative is that this is correcting the over-hiring from the boom times during the pandemic.
Tech workers definitely continue to have a hard time. “Tech isn’t as collegial as it used to be. Rocket ships are being unveiled as sputtering messes, mission-driven startups don’t feel so mission oriented when responding to investor pressure, and widespread layoffs offer a loud reminder that jobs are breakable contracts not sacrosanct vows. Over the past few months, thousands of employees from Meta, Twitter, Stripe, Amazon, DoorDash and countless other companies that don’t have the privilege of being household names are back on the job market.”
And unfortunately, I suspect many more companies will follow the leadership of more established names and some more job cut announcements may still be on the horizon.
How tech workers are reacting depends on their generation.
Reactions to job cuts are partly driven by generational divide. “Millennials and Generation Z, born between 1981 and 2012, started tech careers during a decade-long expansion when jobs multiplied as fast as iPhone sales. The companies they joined were conquering the world and defying economic rules…Baby boomers and members of Generation X, born between 1946 and 1980, on the other hand, lived through the biggest contraction the industry has ever seen. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s eliminated more than one million jobs, emptying Silicon Valley’s Highway 101 of commuters as many companies folded overnight.”
While the pandemic overhire is being corrected, remote is not going away.
There is a marked preference for remote jobs in tech - at least part of the time.
For engineering teams at startups, I’m sharing a few takeaways from a good report.
- Demand for remote engineering continues: 80% of respondents said that they want to work remotely at least 80% of the time.
- This is more than present (66% of respondents are currently working fully remote).
- Demand for remote engineering is basically flat to last year (82% vs 80%).
One of the reasons remote has continued to take-off are the time saving attributes. Research suggests it is over 1 hour per day!
While return-to-office mandates are hitting headlines, in my view, the cat is out of the bag (or rather the worker is out of the office) and there is no putting it/them back in.
We will see exciting new categories emerge.
Yes job cuts are being announced today. But what new ones will emerge?
Will Chat-GPT disrupt content creators? Definitely. Will it also lead to new roles that master the technology? Probably.
A variety of emerging sectors show promise for new roles for displaced technology workers. One of them might be ‘green-collar jobs.’ “More than 300 million additional ‘green-collar’ jobs are expected to emerge by 2050, and transitioning the workforce to have the skills needed to perform in these roles is a big undertaking.”
Lastly, the rise of innovation outside Silicon Valley continues. Future technology companies are being built remotely. So I expect to see the number of technology jobs internationally to continue growing.
Where else do you see opportunity?
Interesting discussions
What is the role of venture studios? “Venture studios create startups by incubating their own ideas or ideas from their partners. The studio’s internal team builds the minimum viable product, then validates the idea by finding product/market fit and early customers. If the idea passes a series of “Go/No Go” decisions based on milestones for customer discovery and validation, the studio recruits entrepreneurial founders to run and scale those startups. Examples of companies that have emerged from venture studios include Overture, Twilio, Bitly, Aircall, and the most famous alum, Moderna.” I was surprised to find out that venture studio companies had higher success rates than those in other programs.
Healthtech is following a similar journey to fintech. This is a topic I’m quite passionate about and actively investing behind. I enjoyed this retrospective on fintech and prediction on health. “For a long time, healthtech companies struggled with a conundrum: if they approached large health systems or payers early on, these entities were unlikely to allow them to build a broader set of services given their limited track record and size.” But a few things have changed: Change #1: There are enough startups to sell into….Change #2: Large early venture funding rounds allows for a quicker ability to serve larger, complex customers…Change #3: A diaspora of talent from earlier startups who deeply understand the space and its problems are building companies.”
The same is true for startups as it is for life, and in this case for running: to succeed doesn't always mean sprinting all the time, or being alone. In running, a growing body of knowledge suggests doing part of your practices more slowly - much more slowly. This means you can push extra hard when it counts, have higher endurance over time, and do more training alongside others (and ignore the noise of social media). "The more I looked, the more I started seeing other coaches advising that athletes slow down their paces—to cover up their watch face with tape if they have to, and especially, to quit looking at other people’s splits on social media. This directive isn’t about fostering a more inclusive running community; that’s just a side benefit. Many coaches like Clark argue that purposefully slowing down the bulk of your training is itself a route to achieving faster times on a race course, and ultimately beating the competition."
I previously wrote about the impact of Chat-GPT in fintech. In that vein, great piece that dives into a few tactical use cases. Remarkably, 72% of financial services firms are reported to be working on ML applications today - not all generative but shows where the puck is going (to share a bit of my Canadian heritage).
If technology changes, so should our habits. But that’s often the problem. A study evaluated the impact of running the dishwasher versus cleaning dishes. Back in the day, the right answer was to clean the dishes for small loads. But today: “running the dishwasher for just two people saves water compared to washing dishes in the sink, assuming you’re not pre-rinsing. On average, dishwashers also yield less than half the greenhouse gas emissions as washing dishes by hand, mostly thanks to heating less water.” Ultimately, this requires changing habits.
How big is fintech? Well, it is the number one unicorn category, globally. Why? It’s in the numbers.
Book of the month
This month I read a book by one of my favorite authors: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book The Song of the Cell. As the NY Times reviews it: "Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken on a subject that is enormous and minuscule at once. Even though cells are typically so tiny that you need a microscope to see them, they also happen to be implicated in almost anything to do with medicine — and therefore almost anything to do with life.”
We’ve made so much progress in our understanding of cell biology - and how to manipulate it.
Yet, so much remains unanswered. “Many medical mysteries remain unsolved. If the book’s protagonist — our understanding of cell biology — seemed to be riding high again on new advances in immunology, such “self-assuredness” was laid low by the Covid-19 pandemic. Mukherjee presents a string of questions that are still unsettled.”
Enjoy.
