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It feels like the world is burning, doesn’t it? It’s hard to care about the struggles of silly scooter start-ups.

Some young tech companies are being crushed as customers shelter at home during the coronavirus pandemic, and they’re laying off workers at lightning speed, as my colleague Erin Griffith writes.

This can be devastating to people who work at start-ups, although the layoffs are a small number compared with the speed and scale of America’s job losses. For the rest of us, these start-ups matter in ways that we can’t always see.

Many of us have come to rely on what these companies provide. There is an economy of homeowners and others who rely on income from Airbnb.