Welcome to Startups Weekly, a human-centered look at the week’s startup news and trends. Subscribe here to receive this in your email. We discovered which companies were unprepared to manage a devastating disaster early on in the pandemic. Now, as the world slowly reopens in the wake of vaccinations, we’re seeing which corporations that soared during the pandemic also lost their discipline in the aftermath.
Over the past two years, tech properly became more vital than ever for the services that it gave to the common human, whether it was empowering a wholly distributed workforce or letting us obtain access to health care via a screen. It became vulnerable as well. Growth during pandemics has always come with a catch: The tech businesses that discovered product-market fit and demand beyond their wildest expectations were those who understood that their victory was at least partially contingent on a rare, once-in-a-lifetime event that would (ideally) fade away.
Throughout the crisis, every growth round, mega-valuation, stunning IPO pop, and total-addressable-market boost gave the impression of strength. However, the same tailwinds that fueled so much value creation also silenced cost-cutting discussions and plans for a future slowdown. Yet, as evidenced by recent layoffs at Peloton and Hopin, a reckoning, or at the very least a re-correction, is beginning to play out.
In Peloton’s example, the layoff is more of a deflationary reaction to a jump in pandemic-fueled demand than a response to a pandemic jolt. Hopin, a live events platform, is confronting a similar challenge. We dubbed Hopin the fastest growth story of this era on the program over a year ago. This week, I learned that Hopin had laid off 12% of its workforce in order to achieve more sustainable growth. Check out my TC+ column for a more in-depth look at this topic: It’s a re-correction, not a new reckoning.
We’ll delve into the metaverse and the Big Takeaway from the recent tech twitter drama in the rest of this newsletter. We’ll also learn why Udemy executives left in order to create a better Udemy. You may help me by sharing this message, following me on Twitter, or subscribing to my personal blog, as usual. Darren Shimkus, the former president of Udemy Business, resigned the edtech business months before it went public to look into a gut sensation.
Modal was the outcome of six months of interviews with heads of data, talent development, and engineering. This week, I published a first look at Shimkus and former Udemy CEO Dennis Yang’s secretive startup and its recently financed corporate cohort-based learning model. Ironically, this is the duo’s second attempt at creating the world’s largest enterprise education organization, albeit with a completely different strategy than their shared Alma University.
