1 in 3 Ex-Google Employees In $15 Billion Worth Of Startups [2023 Layoffs]

From a life of corporate toiling to startup stardom, droves of ex-Googlers have turned their talents to the startup world. The result? A collective $15 Billion worth of venture-funded startups now call ex-Googlers their own.

Who are these ex-Googlers exactly? Which geographical locations are they from? What kind of industries did the other 60+% go to? Join us as we uncover the secrets of life-beyond-layoff for thousands of these former Google employees, and see if we can unearth more insights using cold, hard data.

At Proxycurl, we are in the data enrichment tech business where we enrich people and company profiles with structured data including people data, company/school data, contact & jobs data. Clients that use our APIs & databases include VCs, banks, startups, sales organizations, HRs & more.

We hope you will find our insights useful. But that’s not all - as a special treat, we're offering a never-seen-before giveaway of the entire dataset of ex-Googlers scraped using our products. And this is just the beginning - we have a series of content (and giveaways) coming up that cover the other affected big tech companies, including Meta, Netflix, and Amazon. So be sure to follow us for more insider insights, expert analysis, and the latest news from the tech industry.

Content

• Methodology
• Part I: People Profiles Of 2,762 Ex-Google Employees - Who Are They?
  • Every 2 Laid-Off Googlers, >1 Is From The States (56%)
  • Software Engineers Were Most Affected: 30% Of All Laid-Off Employees
• Part II: 747 Ex-Googlers Found New Jobs - At Which Companies?
  • 747 Ex-Googlers Landed New Jobs / Founded New Companies
  • 58% Of New Companies Are In Technology & IT, Includes Software Development
• Part III: Billions Worth Of Impact Made By Just One Third Of Ex-Googlers
  • One-Third (or 205) Ex-Googlers Joined Startups
  • Equal Proportion Of Startups In The Same Industries As All-Company Universe - 55% In Technology & IT
  • Close To 70% Of Ventures Are In Seed & Series A, B, C Funding Rounds
  • Total Funding Ranges From $50k In Pre-Seed To $3.5 Billion In Series H
• Want The Thousands Of Raw Data Of Ex-Google Employees?

Methodology

• At Proxycurl, we enrich only public LinkedIn profiles (public profiles can be scraped with legal precedence) & from this we identified 117,981 Google employees.

  • There were however 7,872 profiles that returned 404 error with unbeknowst reasons: invalid profiles, private LinkedIn profiles, changed usernames, deleted LinkedIn profiles etc.

• Out of which, 2,762 people indicated a change of employment in the last 4 months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes Valentines’ Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off.

  • Why only 2,762 and not the 12,000 as announced by CEO Sundar Pichai? A main reason could be they have yet to update their LinkedIn profiles. Also, the announced 12,000 could include blue-collar workforce who are not on LinkedIn. Proxycurl dataset is also focused on English-speaking regions, thus would not cover extensively some regions such as India.

• Hereon, the rest of our analysis will focus on the remaining valid profiles. Note: even then some data fields might be absent if the individuals and companies did not fill in the particular fields in LinkedIn, thus certain parts of the analysis might leave out these profiles.

• The 4 main Proxycurl products that we used for this piece are:

  1. Using the Employee Listing API Endpoint, we fetched a list of all past & present employees of Google.
  2. From the list of “Present employees,” we used the People Profile API Endpoint to refresh their profiles to identify who have landed a new job.
  3. Using the Company Profile API Endpoint we then update the profiles of these new companies they joined to get more information.
  4. Our LinkDB LinkedIn Database was also used to identify historical data relating to their time in Google.

Now, let’s dive into the data insight proper.

Part I: People Profiles Of 2,762 Ex-Google Employees - Who Are They?

Who are they? We first take a look at how the layoffs have impacted them, and who it has impacted, namely which countries were most impacted, and which roles?

Every 2 Laid-Off Googlers, >1 Is From The States (56%)

Top Impacted Countries
Naturally, most of the impacted Google employees were based in the States as Google employed the majority of its 117,981 employees from the States and the States being its HQ. Therefore the US herself saw 1,158 (or 56.4%) Googlers leaving the company.

The next countries did not even come close - with United Kingdom in second at only 3.3% of affected Google employees, Ireland with 2.8%, India and Canada with 2.3% and 1.7% respectively. These 4 countries only make up the next 10% of ex-Googlers after the US' 56.4%.

Notably Ireland, and Singapore which came next in 6th made the top despite their small country population (about 5 million respectively), a testament to Google’s human resource investment there. Or de-investment post-layoffs.

Top Impacted Region
Region wise - discounting North America due to the US’s heavy weightage (and Canada topping 5th) - Europe saw 12% of ex-Googlers let go and Asia with 5%, rounding up the 2nd & 3rd most regions with ex-Googlers globally.

Below, the US is excluded from the chart above to see the impact on other countries.

Impact On US States
Note: 44% of the 1,558 US profiles did not return states data, so the analysis will be based only on the remaining 56%.

With that, California being Google global HQ had a whooping 30% of total ex-Googlers (out of the total universe of 2,762), that is quite a lot of people laid off from a single location. The next 3 states are New York at 8.8%, Washington 5.5%, Texas 3.3% (coincidentally they are palindromic decimal). These 3 states themselves have more Googlers laid off then each country that came after the US (UK, Ireland, India).

Food for thought: with US having most of the laid-off Google employees, this inadvertently led to a significant number of them joining the US's huge startup scene - with the country having by far the highest startup investment globally.

Software Engineers Were Most Affected: 30% Of All Laid-Off Employees

Casual observers often remarked that the most affected role is the software engineers. Well, we found that it is indeed true. Out of all 2,762 ex-Google employees, 30.6% (or 844) people were ex-Google software engineers.

As the title field in LinkedIn is a free text input, there are more than 1,500 distinct roles that we observed from our data collected. We then used ChatGPT to clean up and categorize all 2,000+ roles into 9 main categories. Finally we did a quick manual comb-through to correct any discrepancy.

Coming in 2nd to 5th after SWEs are these categories: sales, recruitment, product design, and project management, each with around 11-12% of ex-Googlers each. These few categories combined with software engineers would have amounted to 77% of total roles laid off in Google.

Food for thought: Being part of Google and now laid off, was that what spurred these SWEs to bring their game to the startup scene for a change?

Part II: 747 Ex-Googlers Found New Jobs - At Which Companies?

Now, what’s next for these ex-Googlers? Let’s take a look at where they have headed next, have they all found the next destination, some have founded their own startups - nothing unusual of course from these ex-Googlers.

747 Ex-Googlers Landed New Jobs / Founded New Companies

747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.

There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn. Due to reasons such as: they simply do not need to do so upon securing a new job, they forgot, they wanted to keep their new movement private for a few months, and so on.

58% Of New Companies Are In Technology & IT, Includes Software Development

From our data collected, there were a total of 103 distinct industries identified, from 707 valid company profiles out of 747 ex-Googlers who indicated new employment.

With these 103 distinct industries, we then ask our beloved ChatGPT again to categorize them into a few main categories. It did a pretty good job - discrepancies in some smaller categories aside which we needed to manually clean up.

A total of 56.7% (or 401) companies that ex-Googlers joined are in the ”Technology & IT” industry, out of which 65.6% (or 263) are in “Software Development.” This is well expected because of the people being from Google. If we were to look at the entire pie of 707 new companies, “Software Development” alone takes up 37%.

Food for thought: among these 401 "Technology & IT" companies are startups collectively worth more than $15 Billion that ex-Googlers now join.

Coming in second is the category of “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment.

A Sample Of Companies That Hired Ex-Googlers

Part III: Billions Worth Of Impact Made By Just One Third Of Ex-Googlers

In this section, we want to understand how the departure of this many ex-Googlers impacts the startup ecosystem. What kind of industries and startups welcomed most of these ex-Googlers?
Methodology: we identified startups as companies that fulfill any one of these parameters:

1. Received funding
2. <=50 employees
3. Ex-Googlers joining as "founder" or "co-founder"
4. Incorporated from 2020 onwards

One-Third (or 205) Ex-Googlers Joined Startups

With the parameters above, there are 205 startups/ventures identified. With further breakdown, the list below shows the proportion of companies that fulfill each of the parameters, with a deep dive for the fundings information in the next section.

1. 73 Companies Are Funded: these companies indicated their latest funding rounds being either of these:
   • Pre-seed, seed, series A to H and convertible note.
2. 121 Companies Have <=50 Employees, these are the breakdown:
   • 82 companies indicated 50 employees,
   • 37 companies have 10 employees,
   • 2 companies have 1 sole employee.
3. 43 Companies Have Ex-Googlers As Founder/Co-Founder:
   • 14 are founders,
   • 23 co-founders, consisting of CEOs, CTOs & CROs,
   • 6 founding members (engineers, designers etc).
4. 41 Are Incorporated From 2020:
   • Of those 13 companies founded in 2020, 3 have reached 200 employees, 2 have 500 employees.
   • Those 18 founded in 2021, 3 has 200 employees, 1 has 500.
   • For the 10 founded last year (2022), half have 10 employees and the other half have 50.

Startups Recently Founded By Googlers Who Were Recently Laid Off

Equal Proportion Of Startups In The Same Industries As All-Company Universe - 55% In Technology & IT

Similar to the total universe of 747 companies ex-Googlers joined, companies in the "Technology & IT" category take up also 54.5% (103) of the 205 startups. Out of which, "Software Development" takes up a slightly higher percentage than total company, at 43% (or 81).

Ranked second is also the "Business & Professional Services" category, at a slightly higher of 31.2% out of total startups, and with the same few top industries.

Close To 70% Of Ventures Are In Seed & Series A, B, C Funding Rounds

Majority of latest funding rounds indicated in these company profiles are in the earlier stages, with the later stages tapering off to 6 and 1 companies.

These earlier stages accounted for more than 68.9% of the funding rounds indicated.

On the other end of the spectrum, pre-seed has 3 companies stating that as their last funding round.

Total Funding Ranges From $50k In Pre-Seed To $3.5 Billion In Series H

Note: the chart below has funding amount rounded to the nearest $100,000 for easy reading.

The pre-seed round saw the lowest 2 funding amounts of $50k and $75k. Next lowest is $380k in Seed round, and from there on the funding amounts increase gradually in the subsequent rounds. Series A started from $4.9 Million and capped at slightly below $100 Million.

Series B & C both have a range of below & above $100 Million. Series D & E however have all $100 Million and above. In Series F one company first crossed the billion-funding amount at $2 Billion. For Series G, data wasn’t available in LinkedIn for our scraping.

Total fundings from all companies amounted to $14,956,105,000.

Want The Thousands Of Raw Data Of Ex-Google Employees For Your Own Applications?

There you go! Some analysis of ex-Googlers’ latest movements, as of the time of data collection and writing. Of course our data analysis processes might not be top notch and while we did not commit to achieving that, our commitment was towards the quality of data that we scraped - being fresh as we scraped the data live for this analysis, accurate, and fully-legal.

It is certainly unfortunate that so many people’s roles were affected in these headline-layoffs. There are certainly many who capitalized on opportunities to do something they’ve always liked, founded companies and so on.

Nevertheless if you like what we have put together, we have something tasty for you:

Free data pack with more than USD $11,300++ worth of structured data of ALL ex-Googlers that we talked all about in this piece.

This valuable data pack is available only to VC firms and people in the media industry (i.e. journalists, editors, publishers etc). What you need to do is to just drop us an email at hello@nubela.co and we will get in touch. Get a copy yourself and you can deep dive into the data even more.

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