Tech Startups that Died in 2023

huge payouts for the folks who's stuck with it. But those are actually the exceptions to the rule most startups. The vast majority of startups will fail, and a few will fail in their first year. Somewhere around ten percent of all startups fail in the first year. According to at least some sources, as many as ninety or even ninety one percent of startups fail in the long run, and it might take several years for that to happen, but it does happen. Maybe the business plan never worked out.

Maybe whatever the company was providing people just weren't seeking. Maybe external factors beyond anyone's control were to blame. Maybe the only common factor among all the businesses that went bust is that, you know, they all fizzled out. So I thought it would look back to last year, which was twenty twenty three for those of you listening from the future, and I thought i'd talk about some of the startups that failed that year. Now, these weren't companies

that necessarily launched in twenty twenty three. In fact, none of the ones I'm talking about launched that year, but they did die in twenty twenty three. In one case, it only became mostly dead. So let's dive in. First up, let's talk about a business that actually was around longer than a decade before it failed in twenty twenty three. This also makes you wonder at what point you stop using the word startup to describe a business and then

instead use phrases like established business. I guess most folks say a startup graduates after not after surviving a certain amount of time. It's not like after X number of years you're no longer a startup. Instead, the metric appears to be growing to a certain scale, like once you

hit a certain scale, you're no longer a startup. That seems weird to me because sometimes unicorns scale up way faster than others, but they don't manage to get established, and so I think startup would still be an applicable term. But what do I know? All right? So the businesses I wanted to mention first off, because there's a pair of them that both were owned by the same company were Cloud Nordic and A Zero, So these were two cloud services companies, both of which were owned by a

holding company called Cerdica Holding. Certica Holding also owned a cybersecurity company called netquestaps more on that in a second. And all of these businesses were located out of Denmark, so that means that there's going to be names that I'm going to butcher because I don't speak Danish and I have no familiarity with any Norwegian language. So that's

just a precursor for what's about to happen. Anyway, the various companies that were under Certica Holding had been operating as successful businesses for several years, but all of that would change on Friday, August eighteenth, twenty twenty three. That's when some ransomware hackers infiltrated systems belonging to A zero and Cloud Nordic and locked away essentially all of their customer data, like made it impossible for Cloud Nordic or

A zero to access any of that customer information. And to be fair, I should say that that's not exactly when the hackers necessarily infiltrated the systems, it's when they executed their attack. They had probably actually exploited the systems a week earlier, but every single zero and every single one belonging to the company's customers was removed from their access. And as far as I can tell, the identity of the ransomware hackers has never been disclosed, which is a

little bit strange. It's possible that the information can be found on some Danish cybersecurity site and I simply couldn't find it, maybe because Google's usefulness has arguably become less so over years. There are a lot of people who say that Google is essentially ruined at this point, and maybe I should switch to other web search tools than Google. But I couldn't find a lot of sources, even in Denmark that really went into detail about this. So I'm

not saying the ransomware hackers were never identified. I'm just saying I couldn't fin the information about that. But apparently they did strike it pretty much the perfect time. So Certica Holding was in this process of moving systems from one data center to another. The hackers had apparently already penetrated company systems leading up to this transition, and the actual moving gave them access to pretty much all corporate systems across the board, so it was a total nightmare.

A zero and cloud Nordick admitted that they couldn't and wouldn't respond to ransomware demands. So apparently the hackers demanded money that exceeded the company's access to funds. They could not pay the ransom even if they wanted to, and they said they didn't want to, which is honestly the right answer generally speaking, because paying off ransoms just encourages

more ransoms down the road. If you show that this is a viable way to make millions of dollars, of course more attacks will follow because there's the incentive to do it. If nobody pays the ransom. Eventually, any hacker that's doing this for the money at the very least is going to stop doing ransomware attacks because it won't be effective. It'll be a waste of time for ransomware hackers who are doing this for some sort of perceived cause.

It could be a different story, right if you're doing something because you have a personal grudge against the company, or you believe in some philosophy that targets the company as an enemy, then maybe you would go through the trouble of attacking with ransomware even if you weren't going to get paid out at the end of the day. There are some other factors in this story that make it sound at least a little shady to me, like it raises some red flags. But customers started to receive

notifications that their data was inaccessible. It was caput, it was gone. Cloud Nordic began to restore servers like web servers and email servers, so customers would have access to their domains and their email servers again. But then everything that had been on those servers was gone. It was all blank slate, starting from square one. In the real world, this would be kind of like you come home and you see that your house or apartment building or whatever

is totally gone. You still have access rights to the land where the building had stood, but you have nothing there. You would be forced to rebuild, and just imagine your company and all of your web presence is wiped out. So the two companies A zero and Cloud Nordick went to the rather extraordinary length of advising customers to actually port their accounts to other providers, which signaled that these, these providers, these cloud companies A zero and Cloud Nordick,

were not long for this world. If you're telling your customers, hey, you need to go find a different provider, chances are you're not sticking around very long. One company that popped up as an alternative to Cloud Nordic was called Rocky Nordic. Rocky Nordic exists to this day, but you know what, it didn't exist, or at least, the website for Rocky Nordic didn't exist until August twenty second, twenty twenty three.

So the attack happened August eighteenth, twenty twenty three. So just a few days after this ransomware attack that Cloud Nordick was hit by Rocky Nordic, the website launches, which seems a little strange right now. If I were the fringe theory type, I might start to think that someone over at Cloud Nordic had scrambled to create a new company that also was not saddled with the reputation of having lost every single scrap of customer data to hackers.

And here's a very weird coincidence, y'all. The owner of Rocky Nordic, according to various CVR registers, is Casper Tikiob or Tikub. Again, I don't speak Danish, so I'm butchering the name, but he's the chairman of the board for Rocky Nordic. He was also a co founder of both A zero and Cloud Nordic, and look at that. The Rocky Nordic website talks about how safe and secure their

service is, which is kind of interesting. Also, by the way, if you try to navigate to the old Cloud Nordic site, you get redirected to Rocky Nordic, which is also kind of interesting. Anyway, the damage was done to A zero and Cloud Nordic customers. The company claimed it wouldn't be able to compensate customers for the loss of that data either. That essentially the customer agreement made with these companies essentially said the companies would not be at fault for any

loss of data. So Cloud Nordic and A zero quickly disappeared. Also, net questaps the information security company would disappear. That was the other one that was held by the same holding company. Also interesting that an information security company wasn't able to do more in the face of a ransomware attack that affected its sister companies. How about that? Now, there are

other companies called Netquest out there. Just to be clear, So if you were to like, oh, I want to read up more about this, you need to make sure you're looking at the right net Quest, because there are a couple of other companies called Netquest that are not this one. There's in fact a net Quest here in the United States that provides threat detection for stuff like state backed hacker attacks and that kind of thing, like really serious potential threats. So that's not the same company.

I say that because at least one of the sources I was looking at while I was researching this made the mistake of equating the net Quest that was part of this other holding company with that one. They are not the same. That's a different organization entirely. So that is the sad tale of a family of companies that were wiped out due to external forces. Honestly, I'm surprised I couldn't find more information about this When I was searching, you know, I read a lot of translated articles because

again I can't write, read, or write in Danish. But I would have expected at least a few deeper to investigate how the company's handled or failed to handle, the fallout of this situation that led up to them just shutting down, as well as the questionable origins of Rocky Nordic. I feel like having that jump up so quickly as an alternative, and it was founded by one of the co founders of the companies that had been affected by the ransomware attacks, you know, that just seems like it's

something that needs to be investigated a little bit. Maybe everything is just as it seems on the surface, everything's on the up and up, and you know, there's nothing really questionable here, But I feel like it almost feels like an attempt to continue business as usual and shirking off the reputation of a company that failed to protect customer data to like the most extreme degree possible. It's like if you were running a game and you realize, oh, no,

this game has totally gone off the rails. I'm just gonna quit. Now start a new game, call it something else, and hope that nobody questions me about it, like that's what it feels like to me, and it may not be that. Again, this is my opinion. It's how I feel, how the red flags are popping up in my mind. And there may even be perfect answers for all of this, and I just couldn't find it in my research. So I want to be totally fair here. Okay, let's take

a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about some more flops in twenty twenty three. We're back, so how about we focus on a failed startup in which all the details of that failure are Fuzzy. That's my cute way to introduce the sad story of Fuzzy, a telehealth site for pets, really for pet owners. Pets are notoriously bad at operating apps. Fuzzy introduced apps for pet

owners and on demand telemedicine appointments. Before that, though, Fuzzy actually offered customers the chance to book physical vet visits, so they were working with actual veterinary offices and kind of serving as a booking agency for those. But that particular business approach proved to be too difficult to scale, so in twenty twenty and in twenty twenty one, the

company would change course to focus more on telemedicine. Customers would pay a fee of fifteen dollars per month, and in return, they would have access to various like telehealth appointments and a few other services. Zubin Bette, whose name I'm sure I'm also mispronouncing, founded Fuzzy back in twenty sixteen. By twenty twenty three, the company had raised more than

eighty million dollars in various investment rounds. But on Thursday June fifteenth, twenty twenty three, the company abruptly shut down. And when I say abruptly, I do mean it was fast. Now. Employees reported that they had not been paid since the end of May, so something was clearly up right, and some employees might have already had an inkling that things

were going south in a hurry. There were also other employees who reported that they encountered some difficulties when trying to use company provided medical insurance and to use the various insurance benefits, that they were running into issues with processing. So obviously there were problems that were already evident even before the company officially shut down. But the shutdown was so sudden that a lot of high ranking folks at the company had no idea that it was happening, and

they were just as shocked as anyone else. So, according to the news site Coverager, Zubin Bette's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles were both taken offline. Now they have since been restored, because I saw both of them while I was researching this episode. So I don't want to suggest that he just you know, ghosted the entire world and hid away

because this business that he founded had failed. Initially, that might have been the case, because again that's what Coverager was saying, but when I did the search, they both popped up, so you know, it could have been a knee jerk reaction. I know that if I had a business that failed pretty spectacularly, especially one that had raised like forty million dollars the year before, like a year and a half before, I would be tempted to just

go and hide too. I'm actually tempted to go and hide most days, and I don't have something like that that happened to me. So I'm not blaming him at all if that was his initial reaction, but I don't know for a fact that that was his reaction at all. I just know that it was reported that way, but now it appears that all that information is back up online.

It sounded like the company had owed a great deal of money to its creditors and it just hit a point where money was going out faster than it could come in, even with these large investments in on occasion. But it had been like a year and a half since the last round of investment funding, so I think it was just a critical case of a company running out of all that investment money and not generating enough

revenue to sustain itself. The news site sf gate suggested a potential link between the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank with Fuzzy going off to the Rainbow Bridge. To use a analogy as a reminder, the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed due to a number of reasons, including inflation and high interest rates, which then discouraged various companies and individuals from taking out loans. There were a lot of other

factors that contributed to the bank's failure. To go into all of those would take a full episode by itself, and honestly, it probably would be best reserved for a totally different type of podcast like a financial podcast. Silicon Valley Bank was and now is again, although it's a totally different entity than it was before. But it was very, very important in the tech industry. Like it was a bank that catered to startups and to venture catalysts and

other investors. So it was a big deal. And I do remember when this failure actually happened, because the news broke while I was waiting to board a flight to Austin, Texas for south By Southwest in twenty twenty three, and a bunch of tech executives were supposed to be well. They were on that flight, and I started seeing them all look at their notifications on their phone and start to sweat really, really hard as the money that they counted on was suddenly getting harder for them to get

access to. It was a really dramatic moment that I witnessed, just because I happened to be in the right place at the right time to see it, at least on a small scale of folks who were waiting for a flight from Atlanta to Austin, Texas. Anyway, it's possible that Silicon Valley banks collapse exacerbated problems that already existed at Fuzzy.

Maybe if SVB had remained solvent, Fuzzy would still be around today, But it sounds to me as though the scaling problems were a real issue and that the odds were stacked against Fuzzy even before the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Now, not all startup failures are the end of the story entirely, so let me set the next scene.

It's the spring of twenty fourteen, and you are Keith Alexander, the four star general and former director of the United States National Security Agency, or NSA, and you've just had a heck of a couple of years after denying multiple times that your agency was collecting information on American citizens, because you know, the NSA is really supposed to be

focused on foreign intelligence threats. Then a contractor named Edward Snowden has revealed to the world that, whoopsie Daisy, the NSA kind of was collecting data on Americans after all, at least to the extent of, you know, who Americans were calling and who was calling Americans and like a big, massive record of all of those phone calls. So yeah, you kind of were collecting information about American citizens, even

though you were saying you weren't. So then you go and you retire from that gig and you're looking to launch something new. That knew something in twenty fourteen is a cybersecurity company, and you call it IronNet. It launches on May Well in May of twenty fourteen, and Keith Alexander's involvement and the company's reputation among investors encouraged a lot of initial enthusiasm, so over time the company would

raise more than four hundred million dollars in funding. In twenty twenty one, the plan was to take the company public, but not through the traditional initial public offering or IPO route. So the IPO, as I said, is the traditional way to take a privately held company to become a publicly traded one. You go through a whole bunch of different steps.

You work with underwriters, you work with regulators, and you come up with an initial stock price for your company as well as the number of shares that you're going to issue to a stock market, and the market kind

of takes care of the rest. And if you're really lucky, people are super jazzed about your company, and the stock price goes up because demand is going up, and you end up raising a huge amount of capital that you can then invest into the business and then scale things because now you've got all this cash at your disposal. But there's an alternative to the IPO, which I would call the old standby. It's known as the special purpose

acquisition company or SPAC spack approach. This involves investors creating a shell company that doesn't do anything like it doesn't produce anything, no products, no services, nothing. It just exists for the purposes of going public and then being used

to acquire some other company, like a private company. And at that point the acquired private company becomes part of a public holding company and boom, you got yourself a publicly traded company now, which sounds a bit wild, right, Like you're bypassing all the IPO stuff in order to be able to take this private company public. It's a workaround which sounds like it shouldn't be allowed, but it totally is allowed. Spacks have become really popular in recent years.

They sidestep a lot of tricky hurdles that you have to overcome if you're taking a privately held company public the traditional way. Sometimes companies fail to go to a full IPO. That's happened a few times, so a SPAC is one way to kind of sidestep all that. Now, I've got a lot of cynical opinions about SPACs, but I also have to admit that I am not at all educated about this kind of stuff. My reticence could

only be based off my ignorance. It could be that I'm just completely off base because I don't understand it properly. But it still does seem kind of questionable to me. However. Anyway, in twenty twenty one, iron Net would go public through a SPAC acquisition. Less than a year later, in June twenty twenty two, iron Net would go through a reorganization

and would downsize. It laid off around seventeen percent of its workforce, which is kind of crazy, Like, you know, here's a company that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, then managed to go public through a SPACK acquisition, and now just a year later, is downsizing. Tech Crunch's Carly page included a quote from IronNet spokesperson Joseph P. Deppa the Third that said, quote, the workforce reduction is part of a broader plan to streamline our operations.

For higher efficiency, to reduce overall expenses and preserve cash, and to set iron Net up for rationalized growth going forward. End quote. So it sounds like despite that influx of cash from investments and from going public, iron Net was hitting hard times, which is weird, right because we're also talking about a time when cybersecurity threats were definitely on the rise, like from twenty twenty to today, Like you've seen just such a dramatic rise in cybersecurity threats, particularly

nation backed cybersecurity threats. You would think that a company headed by a former director of the NSA would actually be doing business like gangbusters, like they'd be able to scale easily, you would think based upon just the reputation of the people involved and the factors that were present at that time. But that's not what was going on. Iron Net was not doing well. According to Zach Whittaker, also of tech Crunch, iron Net had fewer than one

hundred corporate customers in twenty twenty two. The company worded it a little differently in a statement from Alexander that read quote, we encountered unexpected headwinds in our transactional business this quarter. To contain costs, we are undertaking a further restructuring of the company with the support of our new CFO,

Cameron four. We have decided to forego a call with management this quarter until we are better able to communicate on our progress end quote, which almost sounds like we don't want to talk to you all till we can get our story straight. In July twenty twenty three, Alexander was shown the door. Now, this was all part of a larger strategy to take the company private again. Remember it had only been public for like less than a year at this point. Linder Zicher who was chosen as

the person who would step in from the investor. She was a big wig over at the main investor C five. She would become the new CEO of this beleaguered cybersecurity company for day to day operations. By this point, Ironnet's stock with down to a measly twenty one cents per share. When the SPAC first acquired iron Net in twenty twenty one, the stock was trading at more than thirteen dollars per share, so down to twenty one cents was a huge decline.

Iron Net would go through some serious slimming even at the board level. The strategy included a requirement that iron Net's board of directors would need to slim down to just seven folks, three of whom would be determined by that venture capital firm C five. And a couple of months after that, in October of twenty twenty three, iron Net went dark. All staff were let go. The company filed for bankruptcy. However, it would end up being only

mostly dead. In February twenty twenty four, iron Net would sputter to life again, emerging from Chapter eleven bankruptcy and restructured as a privately held company. Well, iron Net do better the second time around? Beats me? But golly, I bet folks who invested in the company before it went into bankruptcy are really regretting that decision because that one was a monumental failure leading up to the relaunch. Right, so, rough times, I'm curious about other things that happened at

that company. I saw kind of vague mentions of mismanagement, and it does sound like that would have had to have been part of it, right, Like, you know, how do you have a company that's getting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and then is going public end up having that same issue where you have to reorganize like twice in a year due to issues like that does suggest there's some mismanagement going on, But I didn't find a lot of details, so I'm going to keep

looking to see if I can learn more about what actually happened to this cybersecurity company, because there's got to be more to the story than that. But in the meantime, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I've got one more failure I want to talk about for this episode before we things up. I plan on doing a second episode of failures from twenty twenty three because there were a bunch of them and this is just a small sample. But first, let's take another quick

break to thank our sponsors. Okay, so we're back. Get ready for stating the obvious moment, right, The pandemic really did a big old whammy on businesses. Now, some businesses like Quibi stumbled really hard, and you could at least partly blame the pandemic for that. Now, there are plenty of people who say that Quibi was doomed to fail, whether the pandemic had happened or not. If you don't remember Quibi that was a short form video streaming platform.

The original idea was that this would be something you would watch on your mobile device, like your phone, and that it was designed so that you could watch videos either in portrait or landscape mode, you would get a slightly different experience depending on how you were holding your phone, and that all the content on Quibi would be designed to be digestible in short stents, so like even a full length film would be divided into like ten minute chapters,

so that you could watch it whenever you had time. And you know, you wouldn't necessarily sit down to watch full length films or television episodes in one sitting. It was more like, oh, throughout the day, you might watch a little bit now and a little bit later, and that kind of thing. But Quibi famously blazed out of control in its first year of existence, where it overspent. It spent way too much on production and securing content.

And also you had the pandemic hit, so people weren't out and about with their smartphones anymore, they were staying at home. But again there were those who were saying that even if the pandemic hadn't happened, Quibi probably would not have succeeded. That it was just a bad idea from the beginning. But there were other companies, other services that would do quite well, largely due to the pandemic. I mean, Zoom saw a meteoric rise in importance because

of the restrictions that the world was working under. And you know, when you have so much of the world under lockdown and all meetings have to be virtual, a tool like Zoom is obviously going to do very well well. One company that initially did well under the circumstances of the pandemic was a live streaming service company called Mandolin. In fact, it was the pandemic that inspired Mandolin's co founders to create the company. Mandolin launched on June first,

twenty twenty. Now, when I read that, I assumed that this was actually going to be the story about a company that began as an idea that formed a year or two in advance, right like maybe twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, and that it kind of incubated for months and months before it finally launched in the summer of twenty twenty. But I was wrong. Mandolin's earliest days are traced to just a month before it launched in May twenty twenty.

That's incredible. That's an insane ramp up. Co founders Steve Caldwell, Mary Kay Hughes, and Robert Mitis saw opportunity where otherwise things were really looking pretty bleak. Obviously, the pandemic would have an enormous impact on live performances. Venues had to shut down, Artists had nowhere to go to play, Audiences had nowhere to go to listen. So enormous companies that had built empires on managing live events were suddenly shackled and in a holding pattern, and no one was sure

how long this was going to last. This created a heck of an opportunity for entrepreneurs. A live streaming service catering specifically to live music would have no better shot at gaining mind share than in the early days of the pandemic. I mean, they were already platforms out there that could do this, but they weren't necessarily dedicated for live music. Right like you could do it on Twitch,

you could do it on YouTube. There were solutions out there, but one that was specifically built to cater to the live music community. That was something that was seen as an opportunity. The business minds behind Mandolin secured partnerships with venues like City Winery, so they even had venue sponsored livestream events where you're virtually attending a City Winery show.

They became the backbone for digital only online festivals, and the leaders of the business stressed that the company's success wasn't only dependent upon the unfortunate lockdown situation, that the music industry as a whole was ripe for disruption for a multitude of reasons, and to some extent I agree with them. I do think the live music industry in

general is ripe for disruption. We're certainly seeing a lot more pushback against the traditional live music industry, especially here in the United States, with companies like ticket Master being challenged by the US government saying that they're operating as a monopoly, essentially that they're using anti competitive practices to lock down venues and artists into agreements where Ticketmaster has control of all the different elements in that vertical stack.

We're seeing that happen now. So I agree that the live music industry as a whole is ripe for disruption. However, I'm not sure that Mandolin was doing as much as the creators of the company were boasting about Now, Mandolin's operations received both financial investment and critical acclaim in those few years where it existed. Investors poured several million dollars into the company, and in twenty twenty one, Pollstar named

Mandolin the best streaming platform fast Come. He would follow suit and named Mandolin the most innovative music company in the world in twenty twenty two, and just a year later, Mandolin would cut its strings and shut down. Obviously, some things changed in those years between the company's launch in

twenty twenty and shutting down in twenty twenty three. For one thing, the severity of the pandemic was in decline, and you had a lot more folks going out to live venues, and live venues were opening back up again. Now there was a lot of shuffling going on in the live venue space. You had some folks and companies that were getting out of the business or had failed entirely, and other companies got into it, and Mandolin tried to navigate those changes as well, but found it challenging to

do so so. For one thing, Mandolin introduced a feature called Live Plus in twenty twenty one, as Variety would report. This was really a suite of features that included quote a plethora of digital choices before, during, and after show, from ticket sales to meet and greet or after party add ons to the show, to ordering food and merch online without waiting in line, to getting access at home to replays of shows that are filmed live end quote.

I can totally dig on that. Like one thing I tend to do when I go to a live show is I'm always tempted to scoop up an album by the artists I'm watching, particularly if the album happens to be Vinyl. But it can be a real hassle getting in line at the end of a show. And I can definitely see the value proposition of a service like that where you've got essentially like a virtual line queue or whatever. But for the business side of things, well

that's a bit more opaque to me. So apparently the idea was that venues would opt into supporting this feature. So presumably there would be some sort of compensation for that, right, like the venue would pay a certain amount of money, maybe like a recurring fee on a yearly or monthly basis, to be part of this service. Whether that would actually generate enough revenue to sustain the company in the long run.

I can't say, but at the time Mandolin had raised nearly twenty million investments and then on top of that, had these revenue generation strategies. In twenty twenty two, the company launched a couple of new products called fan Pages and Fan Navigator. These were not geared to live music audiences. These were geared to the actual musicians. So Fan Navigator would give musical acts access to aggregated data about fans.

Fan Pages would include a tool that would collect data from fans in the first place, and presumably acts would then be able to take this information and then make something useful out of it. Perhaps they could use it to plan out new merch launches, or maybe make ideas for new tours, that kind of thing. But despite all these efforts, Mandolin wasn't able to stick around once folks

started to go back to live venues again. Company's website had a message that read quote, we are sad to announce that, after three incredible years of connecting artists and fans more authentically through digital experiences, we are officially closing down our product and business operations end quote, and they said that the final day of operations would be April twenty first, twenty twenty three, and another live streaming music platform called Sessions also shut down, this one much earlier

in twenty twenty three. Like Mandolins, Sessions launched in twenty twenty. In fact, it launched first. It launched in April twenty twenty, right in the very beginning of the pandemic. The former CEO of Pandora was the founder for this company, and rumors about its demise began to circulate in late twenty twenty two. So I didn't really think it quite made the cut for this episode for you know, startups that

failed in twenty twenty three. But you know, the fate of Sessions really did show that Mandolin was not unique in this issue. A lot of companies that had been well positioned to provide products and services during the pandemic failed to remain relevant once those conditions changed, right like once people started to leave their homes again. And this

was something that was bigger than just startups. Obviously, we saw lots and lots of companies start to hold layoffs in the months that followed lockdowns, opening up because these companies had invested big time in ramping things up during the pandemic, and then didn't need those larger staff bases once the pandemic conditions changed. So we didn't just see startups but affected by this. We saw massive companies like big tech companies obviously continued to hold massive layoffs year

over year. And that's just a taste of some of the tech startups that failed last year. I'll bring more of those to you later this week, but for now, I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.