Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we

unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Natasha Masquerinas and

this is our Wednesday show where this week we're nishing down to a single person thinking about their work and unpacking the rest.

Today we're talking to Roger Lee, creator of layoffs. FYI and co-founder of comprehensive and human interest.

There's so much to get to,

but Roger, thank you so much for jumping on equity with us.

Thanks for having me.

So you're one of those people that has been almost a weekly,

if not more, part of my life during the pandemic

thanks to this nifty tool you spun up a while ago called layoffs that FYI and that was the real reason

I wanted to bring you on the pod because those listening have probably interacted with layoffs FYI or unfortunately been a part of it if they were laid off.

So I really wanted to start there and get into a little bit about this tracker that you've used and

has now been cited by most outlets I know that cover tech. Yeah and so just for

context layoffs that FYI is a website that tracks all of the tech layoffs that have been happening since COVID-19 first became a pandemic in early 2020.

And so we will list all of the publicly reported tech layoffs that have happened.

And so on the site you can get our running list of all of the layoffs in tech,

as well as a count of the number of employees laid off in tech and the number of

companies that have done layoffs so far. It's been like I said a huge source for me

as someone who's been covering the startup layoff beat but to give everyone

a sense of how big and all-encompassing this tracker is in 2022 it tracked that over 1,000 tech companies had layoffs and over 154,000 employees were laid off.

And so there is this sort of back end curiosity and I think visualization that happens when we see it charted in such a way.

But Roger, as we've talked through the months, it's clear that it's kind of been part of your

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