Google has ~60,000 employees worldwide. From various online sources, they have +/- a few thousand who live in San Francisco. Twitter and Yelp and Square and Dro

Google has ~60,000 employees worldwide. From various online sources, they have +/- a few thousand who live in San Francisco. Twitter and Yelp and Square and Dropbox and AirBnB and the other unicorns each employ somewhere in the mid hundreds to low thousands (e.g. 500-2,000) -- again, worldwide. The local numbers are lower. I don't know reliable this [1] is, but it suggests that there are ~50,000 tech employees total in SF, and the top 50 companies employ about 30,000 of those. So the big players have a lot of people, but it's not as dramatically skewed as you're thinking -- maybe 40% of tech employees work at smaller companies. That passes the smell test for me. Even assuming that the big players wouldn't lay anyone off (they would; they always do) That's more than enough to make an economic dent in a downturn. [1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/jobs-at-tech-companies-google-twitter.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/jobs-at...