The young kings of Silicon Valley are leaving their startups. With emotionally charged desires and hopes, they say goodbye to the companies that founded and run them. In recent weeks, Ben Silberman, co-founder of the digital platform Pinterest, and Joe Gubbia, co-founder Airbnb, announced his imminent resignation as CEO of his company, and Apoorva Mehta, founder of the food delivery app Instacart, said he would end his tenure as executive chairman of the company within a year. After all, their founders retired this year TwitterPeloton, Medium and MicroStrategy.

In recent years, investors have invested huge sums in these startups, and their founders were considered great visionaries.

The layoffs mark the end of an era for startups that have come out of Silicon Valley with great market value over the past decade and represent an era. In recent years, investors have poured huge sums of money into these start-ups, which have come to be known as “unicorns”, worth $1 billion or more, and whose founders have been regarded as great visionaries. As founders of their companies, they fought to have privileged rights to the ownership status of their companies and to keep them under their control. They represented a new generation of entrepreneurs, different from the previous one, who were often replaced by more experienced leaders, and in some cases forced to sell their shares. However, the sharp drop in the stock markets this year hit their companies hard, and everything began to change. Investors have turned their backs on startups and forced these new Silicon Valley companies to cut costs and carefully change course. And they definitely won’t leave with their heads held high. Shares of Pinterest are down 60% in the last 12 months, Airbnb is down 25% and Instacart is down 40%.

Mark Zuckerberg fully embodies the modern model of a young entrepreneur. He was cocky, had no respect for the business community, and managed to keep his interest in Facebook by creating a “school” of young entrepreneurs with the right privileges and the right attitude from investors. They remained at the helm of their business even as he grew up and developed skills that surpassed theirs. They all kept their companies out of the stock market for as long as they could, all showing an understanding of their mistakes that rarely happened to their female counterparts. And some of them are out of control. Adam Newman, for example, spent money recklessly and was forced out of WeWork in 2018 despite retaining a majority stake. Similarly, Travis Kalanick was fired from Uber in 2017 despite the large number of shares he owned. As it turns out, running a public company with its attendant confidential responsibilities, analyst criticism, and quarterly earnings announcements is hard work. In the midst of the problems caused by the great market downturn, startup founders are relinquishing the power and control they once claimed. And, as 34-year-old investor Trace Cohen notes, realizing that they now need to work much harder for much less money, startup founders “let some executives take over their company and grow it with other kinds of incentives.”