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Hello reader,
I don’t want to ruin your day with baffling facts, but here’s a thought worth pondering: Between being unemployed and losing a loved one, it takes longer to adapt to the pain of becoming jobless.
While the idea initially defied my intuition, I realized how getting fired feels so personal.
Apart from the obvious economic insecurity it brings, it’s usually interpreted as a judgment of one’s character and abilities. It could potentially cause an existential crisis, so it isn’t weird in the least that it could be harder to recover from losing your job than it is to grieve over death.
That’s why layoffs hurt people not just financially, but also emotionally and spiritually. There was a spike in job cuts at Asia’s tech startups in May, and it looks like another round is right around the corner.
Our big story for the day features all the details about recent layoffs across Southeast Asia, along with interesting data from China and India.
Today we look at:
- A list of layoffs across tech startups in Southeast Asia, China, and India
- An Indian company that offers Bitcoin as cashback
- Other newsy highlights such as Tiger Global’s latest investment in an Indian fintech firm and Binance Labs’ big bet on Web3 startups.
Premium summary
Layoff blues in Asia
Image credit: Timmy Loen
With liquidity drying up, VC funding for startups in the region has been on the decline. This funding shortage has led to over 111,000 pink slips from Asian tech startups.
Funding in the region dropped by 7% in the first quarter of 2022 to US$36.3 billion compared to the same quarter last year, according to a Crunchbase report.
What’s more troubling is that it saw a 31% slump from the previous quarter. Tech in Asia has come up has been tracking publicly disclosed layoffs across Southeast Asia, India, and China, and here’s some of our findings.
Bitcoiners’ paradise
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