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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I imagine severance packages are a big factor here.

People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!

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> plus health insurance through Cobra.

Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).

The companies (at least Meta/Google) are paying the full cost of healthcare for 6 months, at zero cost to those laid off.

Oh shit, nice. That's not COBRA, but a benefit on top of it (to be clear, for anyone who may one day be able to use COBRA and might not realize the company doesn't usually pay for it) but is pretty great for those who were laid off, in this case.

I'd imagine it's technically "COBRA, but we pay for it" as opposed to "We have kept you in the same status as an employee"

Cobra has this unique advantage that you can turn it on retroactively, so it's actually decently cheap for healthy individuals. You can just plan to not pay for it and then if things go wrong you can incur medical bills and send them to cobra after signing up. Of course you do have to backpay cobra if this happens.

Yep, that's true! Thanks for adding that, it is important. As long as you can put enough money aside to cover the entire COBRA period, this is indeed the best "play" when offered COBRA, unless you're sure you're gonna need it from the beginning (in which case you may as well just sign up to begin with—less hassle that way). If you don't end up needing it, you basically just got free health insurance for a few months.

it's 60 days to elect whether you'll be using COBRA. If employment is terminated early in the month usually coverage is still there through the end of the month, but if termination is at the very end of the month it can be exactly just 2 months, not few.

Ah good catch. The 60 day deadline was paused during Covid but I guess it’s coming back starting this May.

I thought cobra gave you group healthcare rates. Meanwhile individual healthcare might have had restrictions and higher premiums.

Yes, group rates. It probably varies by states, but basically all group plans—even ones that aren't that great—are more expensive than even our gold-tier HCA plans, let alone silver and bronze (because all our HCA plans are terrible by comparison to even the fairly-poor group plans). The group plans might actually be cheaper in other states, I dunno. (there are also literally zero providers of individual plans that aren't on the healthcare exchange, in this state—none—so the couple options on there are all you've got)

I think you mean ACA plan, not one that confirms to the Affordable Care Act and is available for purchase in healthcare.gov

As someone laid off from a company with no name recognition and two weeks of severance, I’m just hoping to find something before all the more impressive resumes come flooding back into the system.

Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.

Hang in tight brother, and if you have a public CV you can share, maybe you could join one of those startups.

I'd imagine the way the stock market was prior to 2022 also plays a factor. I know plenty of senior+ level people in tech who made a killing off their RSU growth and could basically retire modestly in their 30s. There's lots of talented people with strong tech backgrounds and big safety nets right now.

I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is.

Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?

I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.

AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.

These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform.

The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.

Using pre-trained AI models only requires surface-level knowledge about AI. You need to know its limitations, but you don't need to know tensorflow or how transformer networks work to be able to use AI for consumer applications.

Disagree about AI. I think it's going to upend industry after industry, and the gold-rush is not going to be in making new advancements, but applying the startling new capabilities of the last year or so to more and more domains

In this way I think it's very similar to the web and then mobile booms

Not at all, only passion is needed.

Look at websites like CivitAI. Its literally just a front-end + a S3 bucket backend that allows people to share and download large stable-diffusion models (100MB-8GB).

The website founder was not an AI guy, he was a web-dev background and former founder. The website is already a huge success, forcing the incumbent (Huggingface, backed by Amazon) to try and hurriedly copy its features.

I don't think I agree with this right now.

The tech and business mindset of 15 years ago is remarkably similar to that of 15 years before that, and 15 years before that, even.

Businesses need technical functionality that enables the core mission of the company, and they need accurate operational insights.

This means "boring" technology. It means reliable systems and processes. It means accurate reports who's methodology can be understood clearly.

I prefer to solve real problems with boring technology, than to solve imaginary problems with exciting technology.

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