Startups are down now --- big cuts coming and VC is down across the board

(Ashley, “SVB collapse is double-whammy for tech startups already navigating brutal market,” pg online @ https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/19/svb-fail-is-double-whammy-for-startups-dealing-with-plunge-in-venture-.html //um-ef)

Next month will mark 18 months since the Nasdaq peak, and there are few signs that investors are ready to hop back into risk. There hasn’t been a notable venture-backed tech IPO since late 2021, and none appear to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, late-stage venture-backed companies like Stripe, Klarna and Instacart have been dramatically reducing their valuations. In the absence of venture funding, money-losing startups have had to cut their burn rates in order to extend their cash runway. Since the beginning of 2022, roughly 1,500 tech companies have laid off a total of close to 300,000 people, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. Kruze Consulting provides accounting and other back-end services to hundreds of tech startups. According to the firm’s consolidated client data, which it shared with CNBC, the average startup had 28 months of runway in January 2022. That fell to 23 months in January of this year, which is still historically high. At the beginning of 2019, it sat at under 20 months. Madison Hawkinson, an investor at Costanoa Ventures, said more companies than normal will go under this year. “It’s definitely going to be a very heavy, very variable year in terms of just viability of some early-stage startups,” she told CNBC. Hawkinson specializes in data science and machine learning. It’s one of the few hot spots in startup land, due largely to the hype around OpenAI’s chatbot called ChatGPT, which went viral late last year. Still, being in the right place at the right time is no longer enough for an aspiring entrepreneur.