downturn

As quickly as mortgage rates are rising, the once red-hot housing market is cooling off. Home prices are still historically high, but there is concern now that they will ease up as well.All of this has people asking: Is today's housing market in the same predicament that it was over a decade ago, when the 2007-08 crash caused the Great Recession?The short answer is: no. America's housing market is in far better health today. That's thanks, in part, to new lending regulations that resulted from that meltdown. Those rules…

It’s confirmed — Black entrepreneurs saw a dramatic decrease in funding this year as investors continue to pull back. So far, new Crunchbase data shows Black startups received $324 million in VC funds in the second quarter, a steep decrease from the $1.2 billion received in Q1 this year and substantially below the $866 million the founder cohort raised in Q2 last year. Overall, Black founders have received more than $1.5 billion in capital so far this year, compared to the over $2 billion received this time last…

According to Crunchbase, more than 17,000 tech workers have lost jobs since the start of this year. That’s painful, but for perspective: TechCrunch tracked more than 100,000 tech layoffs between August and December 2008. In my experience, founders and investors usually come out unscathed on the other side of events like these. For below-the-line employees, however, unexpected layoffs can be life-changing: One former product manager I used to work with now sells residential real estate, and another works in public…

ServiceNow Chief Executive Bill McDermott told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Monday that he doesn't expect the current economy to undergo a market downturn like the 2008 financial crisis."This is not even close to 2008. In 2008, I was with a company where we lost a billion euros in pipeline in a day. That was a crisis. This is not a crisis," McDermott said in an interview on "Mad Money.""If anything, this is a crisis of opportunity. The digital transformation market is $11 trillion in the next three years, okay. If you're going to…

From black swan memos and heart-to-hearts to not-so-subtle emails asking for on-the-record confirmations that your startup does, indeed, have revenue, investors have a lot to say about the downturn. Yet, it’s a quieter and more realistic truth that has landed my attention as of late: For diverse founders, the downturn is nothing new. Some investors, largely those who focus on backing historically overlooked founders, say that the crackdown on tech companies isn’t impacting diverse founders as harshly as their overly…

Klaus Vedfelt | DigitalVision | Getty ImagesMonths of stock market volatility may deliver a costly surprise to parents sending children to school this fall: smaller-than-expected 529 college savings plan balances. The average 529 account size was $30,287 in 2021, according to the College Savings Plans Network, but families may now have lower balances, financial experts say.And it may be a "rude awakening" for parents scrambling to make their first payments in August, said certified financial planner Lisa Kirchenbauer,…

SINGAPORE—Economic activity in China declined for a third straight month in May, though at a slower pace than in April, according to surveys of businesses and factories.But while the surveys suggest the economy is beginning to climb out of a severe downturn as Covid-19 restrictions are eased, economists are skeptical about a big revival. Growth will remain subdued, they say, as long as the government employs a zero-tolerance approach to virus outbreaks that involves mass lockdowns and business closures. Shanghai, for more…

Wall Street Journal: Sequoia, YC, Craft Ventures, and other VCs give startups advice on surviving the downturn; Lightspeed: “boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over” — Venture-capital firms tell portfolio companies to buckle down for the long haul; ‘before you thrive, you have to survive’ Wall Street Journal: Sequoia, YC, Craft Ventures, and other VCs give startups advice on surviving the downturn; Lightspeed: “boom times of the last decade are…

In recent online slide presentations, blog posts and social-media threads, venture-capital doyens including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator are telling the founders that they need to take emergency action for what could be the sharpest turn in more than a decade. Their advice includes cutting costs, preserving cash and jettisoning hopes that hedge funds or other investors will swoop in with big checks. “The boom times of the last decade are…

Sequoia takes things seriously. The storied venture firm is known to react to macroeconomic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large. Most recently, Sequoia created a 52-slide deck, first reported by The Information, titled “Adapting to Endure.” The document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020” memo of March 2020. The firm is not always right in its prognostications — maybe why it stuck to internal…