When firms go low, employees go solo

Workers laid off because of AI are harnessing the technology to start their own companies

- Bhagyashree Garekar

On the day Meta began implementing its plan to lay off a tenth of its workforce, a one-time employee, Xiaoyin Qu, saw her chance.

“We rented an LED truck and drove inside Meta’s headquarters,” she said.

The truck’s screens flashed a blunt message at departing employees of the social media giant. “Fired? Start a company before lunch.”

The stunt appears to have worked. Qu says dozens of Meta employees reached out to her start-up, which provides an AI operating system for one-person firms.

The exact number is hard to verify, but the upshot appears to be that layoffs can perhaps be reframed as a beginning.

China-born Qu, the 33-year-old founder of HeyBoss.AI, represents a new kind of entrepreneur emerging across Silicon Valley even as heavy tech layoffs dominate the news. Her company, based in Redwood City, California, helps users build businesses using teams of AI “executives”. In 2025, she made a splash by stepping aside in favour of an AI CEO she named Astra.

Astra, which helped Qu with negotiations to secure a US$3.5 million (S$4.5 million) seed round backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2025, also runs her other ventures.

Qu’s latest product, Tycoon.us, pushes the idea of an AI chief executive further. An aspiring founder can prompt Astra with a goal — “10x traffic”, for instance — and it generates a plan, assigns AI agents, tracks execution and escalates decisions to the founder only when needed.

The appeal is obvious in a moment when workers increasingly feel exposed and many see themselves as dispensable cost centres that can be cut to boost corporate margins. The result is a strange loop; AI is helping solve a problem that AI itself helped create.

The scale of AI-driven layoffs is disputed but there is a sense of where things might be headed.