The startups are getting shut down

The party is over for tech startups, said Erin Griffith. The “easy-money ebullience of the last decade” has turned into “fear and loathing.” Even inside the relentlessly optimistic tech world, there is “the sense that the startup world’s frenzied behavior of the last few years is due for a reckoning.” A record $131 billion in funds was raised by startups last year, according to PitchBook, and up until a few months ago, “investors were still begging founders to take more money and spend it to grow faster.” But Wall Street has soured on such unprofitable and risky bets, and numerous high-profile startups that went public in recent months have gotten hammered in the stock market. So far this year, venture funding has dried up; the venture capital firm D1 Capital Partners, which participated in roughly 70 startup deals last year, announced it was pausing its dealmaking. Many entrepreneurs are experiencing whiplash. Knock, a home-loan startup, planned to go public at a $2 billion valuation last year. By March, the deal was dead and Knock was laying off half its employees. Its valuation had been halved even though Knock’s business continued to grow. “Investors no longer cared.”