You cannot open a feed right now without being told your job has an expiry date. AI writes the code, closes the tickets, and runs the funnel. It shows up in every restructuring memo and every new round of layoffs. The message is not subtle. You are the cost. And the cost is being optimized.
More than half a million tech jobs have been eliminated since 2022, and the number is still climbing. But I’d like to redirect your attention, because something else has been happening on the same timeline.
Among the people who got cut were those who used the interruption to start building. Some put their severance into an idea they already had. Some built between job applications and kept going after they found another role. One even hoped he would be included in the layoffs so that he could leave with a package and start building.
These are not seven versions of the same story. Not every layoff was caused by AI restructuring. Not every company was built cheaply, and not everyone left employment behind for good. What connects them is the recalculation that followed: once the job disappeared, building a tech startup of their own no longer looked as impractical as it had before.
Here are seven builders who entered their founder era after a layoff.
#1. Sam Perry, Ensemble
Before: Nine years at FedEx, three at Anheuser-Busch, then HR tech at G-P
Perry was cut in November 2022, one month after his team won a major industry award. He was in his late thirties and had always wanted an MBA, so he priced one properly. He started his search with Harvard and Wharton, but the cost came in at over $100,000 a year for two years. That was more than his severance could cover, and with no job waiting at the end. The cheaper online and UK programs felt worse, because without the prestige of Harvard and Wharton attached, he would be paying for less of the thing he was actually buying.
A friend suggested he skip it and start a company instead.
He put roughly a fifth of his severance into Ensemble, an HR tech marketplace he had already been building on the side at G-P. Most of the stack was off the shelf. He taught himself enough through free MIT online courses to make platform changes himself, then pivoted the business to procuring HR software directly for customers.
A competitor acquired Ensemble in summer 2024. Perry is now 40 and a group VP at the supply-chain risk company Sphera. His read on the whole thing: plenty of people have an MBA, very few have built and sold a company, and in a crowded market the second one is what separates you.
#2. Alphonzo Terrell, Spill
Before: Head of global social and editorial, Twitter
Terrell got home from Twitter’s Los Angeles office in November 2022 and found he could no longer log into Slack. That was how he learned he had been cut, along with roughly half of the company’s 7,500 employees.
He was 41, with a record label he had launched as a Columbia student behind him and two decades at Sony, Showtime and HBO before Twitter, where he ran the thirty-person team managing the platform’s global social presence.
That afternoon, he posted that he wasn’t sure what came next, but he was certain it was time to build something new. Then he called DeVaris Brown, another Twitter alum.
Under three months later, Spill closed a $2.75 million pre-seed led by MaC Venture Capital and the Kapor Center. Terrell was non-technical, which he has said was the genuinely daunting part, more than the money or the timeline.
Spill entered invite-only beta on iOS in June 2023 and opened its beta to all iOS and Android users that December. The company says it reached number one in the Apple App Store within three weeks of its beta launch.
It has since raised more than $6 million from investors including Greylock and Bessemer. In April 2025, Spill said it was on course to cross $1 million in annualized revenue that year, with paid partners including Netflix, Warner Bros. and Paramount+. It has also been named Apple’s App of the Day twice.
#3. Henry Kirk, Studio.init()
Before: Eight years at Google, previously a technical lead at Amazon
Google cut roughly 12,000 people on January 20, 2023. Kirk went, and so did most of the thirty-person team that reported to him.
One of them met him for coffee a few days later to catch up and talk through prospects. He had already started updating his resume. Kirk had a different idea: take the team and found their own company instead. That was the founding conversation, and the answer was yes.
They funded it with their payouts. Kirk has said on the Builders Gonna Build podcast that his severance was what let him survive long enough to try.
Studio.init() launched that April out of Hoboken, a design and engineering studio built from the team Google had just let go. Kirk set one hiring rule: candidates had to be ex-Google or someone a layoff had hit.
Over the next three years, Studio.init() said it shipped software for more than 50 startups, including a robot coffee shop.
In April 2026, co-founder Minh Phan announced that Studio.init() was joining industrial software company Octave. Phan moved into the role of Head of Design, accompanied by the studio’s engineering lead, Tumenbayar Shiirevvaanchig. Kirk, meanwhile, is now a senior engineering manager at Apple.
#4. Alex Whedon, Subquadratic
Before: Software engineer, Meta
Whedon wanted to start a company. He also did not want to walk away from a package to do it. As he told Inc.: “I was praying I’d be included in the layoffs.” His reasoning was simple. He wanted his own startup, so why leave for free?
He got his wish and initially used the moment to launch Jenn AI, an AI-powered sales software company. He later became Head of Generative AI at TribeAI, where he led more than forty enterprise AI implementations.
He is now co-founder and CTO of Subquadratic, a thirteen-person Miami company that emerged from stealth in May 2026 with $29 million in seed funding at a reported $500 million valuation. The round was led by investors including Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund, alongside people who had invested early in Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe and Brex.
The Subquadratic team includes eleven PhD researchers and research engineers with backgrounds across Meta, Google, Oxford, Cambridge, ByteDance, Adobe and Microsoft.
#5. Samih Sghier, InboxPilot
Before: Developer, laid off and job hunting
Sghier spent months on the receiving end of automated rejections, emails from systems that had scanned his application without a human ever reading it. So he built a machine that reads and answers emails.
InboxPilot connects to an inbox and uses a company’s public-facing material, its website, FAQs, PDFs, and brochures, to draft or send replies automatically. It targets the addresses generating the most repetitive volume: support@, info@, and similar addresses. Two rules are built into the design. If the bot is unsure, it escalates to a human. If a human enters the thread, the bot steps back.
Sghier listed the project on Devpost in March 2025, identifying Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Python as parts of the stack.
[Samih Sghier’s account of his layoff comes from his own founder post rather than reported coverage.]
#6. Jacky Liang, Answer HQ
Before: Developer advocate, Pinecone
Liang worked as a developer advocate for about four months before he was laid off. He went through the same motions as most, dealing with the disappointment that came with the cut. Until he decided to channel that disappointment into building something new.
The idea started as the solution to a small annoyance. He kept landing on restaurant and recipe websites wanting one basic fact, the opening hours or the actual recipe, and having to scroll through tons of literature to get to it. Why could you not just ask the site a question?
He skipped most of the validation process he had learned as a product manager and built an MVP in two to three weeks: a chat widget that sat on a website, with the imports and account setup done manually behind the scenes. On the Solopreneur Grind podcast, he credited AI coding tools for the pace.
His friend Ren, who runs an e-commerce business, was fielding similar shipping and sizing questions repeatedly at the time and installed Liang’s chat widget. Within a week, Ren paid for a full year up front. At the time, that was $6 a month, so the first revenue Answer HQ ever booked was $72. Liang has said he locked in the price for Ren permanently.
As of June 2025, Liang said Answer HQ was processing around 100,000 questions a month across its customers. He had also reached a monthly revenue target in January 2025, twelve months ahead of the deadline he had originally set.
Answer HQ did not replace the job search. Liang found another full-time role within a month of being laid off and continued building the company in the evenings and on weekends. He is now Developer Relations Lead at OpenRouter and still runs Answer HQ alongside his job.
The company remains fully bootstrapped. Liang’s reasoning is straightforward: without outside capital, no investor gets to decide how quickly the company must grow or what it must become. For now, the pace belongs to him and his customers.
#7. Sam Brown, Fathom AI
Before: 25 years in tech, cut in an AI restructuring
Brown was laid off in July 2025 in what he describes as an AI-related reduction. He decided to treat the timing as a head start on a shift that he expected more workers to face.
He joined Fathom AI as president, running the finances alongside founder Ben Hooten and Dan Crump, a former Marine with enterprise sales history at GE, IBM, and HP.
Fathom sells sales enablement software to the medical aesthetics industry. The company is three humans and twelve AI agents holding real operational roles. One runs customer success for a national sales force. Another wakes every two hours to scan the competitive landscape and file a briefing.
The founders put $300 in initial cash into the company. Within twelve weeks of launching, Fathom had reached an estimated $300,000 in annual recurring revenue, with gross margins above 90% and operating costs below 10% of revenue, according to records reviewed by Fortune.
The company took no outside funding. It reached the term-sheet stage with a venture investor, then walked away after the investor outlined the engineering and customer-success teams Fathom would supposedly need to build. Hooten and Brown left the meeting unconvinced that they needed any of them.
Nine months before Fortune reported the story, Brown had been laid off in an AI-related restructuring. By April 2026, he was helping run the finances of a cash-flow-positive company that had started with three people, twelve agents and $300 in initial capital.
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Most of these companies were not started this year. Terrell, Kirk, and Perry began in 2022 or early 2023, but they did not all build the same way. Terrell raised $2.75 million and assembled a team. Kirk started with six former Google colleagues. Perry put part of his severance into a side project built largely from off-the-shelf software.
By 2025 and 2026, the range of possible paths had widened. Whedon raised $29 million to pursue frontier AI research. Liang and Sghier built smaller, narrower AI products largely on their own. Fathom took the lean version furthest: three people, twelve agents, and $300 in initial cash.
That does not mean every idea can be built alone or bootstrapped for the price of a software subscription. Some still require co-founders, specialist teams, outside capital, and years of runway.
But if you’ve been carrying a software idea for years and telling yourself you would need all of it just to find out whether the idea works, run that calculation again. For a growing category of software companies, it stopped being true somewhere between 2022 and now.
Companies will keep restructuring around AI. That part is not going to stop. But neither will the compression happening on the other side: less infrastructure to assemble, less work that requires a full team, and less money needed to reach a first customer.
If your job is on a clock, it may be time to put the launch of your idea on one too.
