How A Recession Can HELP New Startups

Paul Graham wrote a blog post back in 2008, right after the crash, where he goes, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup, but I'm not saying it's a good time either. The truth is more boring. The economy doesn't matter much either way. So I was curious, Dharmesh, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. So my position is I lean more towards either neutral, that it doesn't matter, towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a downturn economy or recession is that things become available that would not have been available to a startup before, like talent. It's like, well, there are people sitting at Meta, Facebook, or sitting at Google right now that may be reevaluating their lives, or they may have just been let go. Things that were super expensive, like buying Google AdWords or certain marketing channels, because you had this glut of money and a glut of venture capital. And as in a downward economy, you're going to get less of that kind of glut of money flowing in, which drives the cost overall down for certain things that I think are important to entrepreneurs. So I'm generally net positive that a down economy is actually a relatively good time to start a startup.