Siobhan Green had been a senior digital development adviser with the U.S. Agency for International Development for two years before being laid off in the agency-wide cuts of 2025. Prior to that, she ran her own small consultancy firm for 15 years, providing technology services to the likes of the United Nations, the federal government, and USAID — an experience that has proven invaluable in her return to building a business. “I'm back to being an entrepreneur, not because I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but because it's actually a lot easier to create a job than to get a job in this market,” she said.
Being laid off from her dream job in February 2025 has been difficult to process. To Green, the psychological toll of what she and many others have gone through shouldn’t be underestimated, including the sense of losing one’s identity. “We’ve not only seen the entire industry crumble and see everyone we know lose their jobs, [but] it’s also the moral injury that we see to topics that we deeply care about.”
Luckily, she could rely on her network of former colleagues from USAID’s office of digital technology, who kept in touch about the difficulties of job seeking and what was happening in the sector. Faced with a highly competitive job market, and recognizing there was still domestic and international demand for the digital services and deep technical expertise they’d built, a group of them started exploring the idea of launching something on their own. Not to mention that “setting up your own company reflects better on your CV than just having been unemployed for a year,” she said.