Y Combinator lays off 20% staff, scales back on late-stage investments

NEW DELHI: US-based technology startup accelerator Y Combinator is laying off 17 employees -- or 20 per cent of its staff -- as it announced to scale back late-stage funding.

The layoffs came as Y Combinator, which has invested in thousands of startups including at least 200 from India, wrote a petition to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse, asking them to prevent shockwaves that could lead to financial crisis and layoffs of more than 100,000 workers.

The company, however, said the layoffs were planned before the SVB collapse.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in a statement that YC is rightly known for early stage investing.

"In recent years, we have also done some late-stage investing. But late-stage investing turned out to be so different from early-stage investing that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission. So we're going to decrease the amount of late stage investing we do," he mentioned.

As a result, "we will no longer need some of the roles on the late stage investing team. Seventeen of our teammates are impacted today," Tan wrote.

The YC CEO said this shouldn't have any noticeable effect on the companies it has funded.

"YC is known primarily as a place where very early founders create something from nothing by simply applying online and joining the world's best founder community," said Tan.

Over 1,200 CEOs and founders representing over 56,000 employees had signed the YC petition to save startups and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the Y Combinator community, one-third of startups with exposure to SVB used SVB as their sole bank account.