Meta layoff – After being laid off from Meta in 2023, Emily Pitcher spiraled—then turned her rejection into a pivot. She pursued entrepreneurship full-time, negotiated her way through early brand deals, taught herself to code, shared her game-in-progress online, and is now
When Emily Pitcher walked out of her job as a content designer at Meta in 2023, she didn’t just lose a paycheck. She lost the role that made her feel like herself.
“I was laid off from my job as a content designer at Meta in 2023,” the 26-year-old game developer and content creator based in Los Angeles recalls. “All I wanted was to be rehired. It was my identity, and without it, I lacked purpose.”
Rejection after rejection in the job market followed. The experience left her spiraling long enough that what started as a search for another Big Tech seat slowly became something else entirely: entrepreneurship full-time, as an indie game developer and content creator.
Now, she is partnering with a publisher to launch her game, “Lily’s World XD,” around the end of the year. She credits the turn for pulling her toward work she says she’s truly passionate about—and for making her realize there are people who would “do anything to trade places” with someone in her situation.
If she could return to the moment she first got laid off, she says she would tell herself: “things will be OK.”
Her pivot didn’t start with a grand plan. It started with outreach.
Before the layoff, she had a small social media following, but she “had never done a brand deal before.” Afterward, she made a spreadsheet of all the brands she’d “ever dreamed of working with” and worked through it, reaching out to them to partner.
It worked. She got her first few brand deals that way, and the early wins taught her how the social media economy actually runs: how to negotiate rates, send invoices, and correspond with brands. She now says social media brand deals are one of the core ways she makes money.
But the road from those early deals to her current momentum wasn’t smooth. She describes a period after the layoff when mornings felt impossible—when she “felt despondent for so long.” Getting out of bed was a struggle, and she acted “out of fear, not joy.”
The broader tech layoff news didn’t help. She says it was hard to hear “news come out so often about more tech layoffs. ” and the prospect of finding a new Big Tech job started to feel hopeless. She adds that she wasn’t alone in having a familiar credential: “Sure. I had a Big Tech name on my resumé. but so did everyone else who got laid off from one.”.
What changed, she says, was realizing the opportunity wasn’t coming from outside.
She points to the simple idea that if opportunities aren’t in front of you, you can create your own. She didn’t say it was easy to believe at first. She only says it’s what she wishes someone had told her.
Sharing the truth became part of that creation.
Pitcher posted a video about her layoff on TikTok. Over time, she says it became one of those moments she didn’t understand until after it spread: “to this day, a lot of people who recognize me in public tell me it’s the first video they saw of mine.”
Being open and authentic about her situation, she says, gave her a boost and pulled her community closer.
Then she posted a follow-up months later—this time about still struggling after the layoff. In that video, she talked about lacking friends, lacking a purpose, and not knowing what she was supposed to do. The response was immediate. She woke up to “probably one hundred DMs from people saying they were in a similar situation.”.
One person who reached out became her friend and helped her get into voice acting, a field she hadn’t expected to enter. Voice acting, she says, is now another way she makes money.
Her game, “Lily’s World XD,” also required learning skills she had been putting off.
When she started making it. she says she “had never coded in my life.” She had told herself her brain didn’t work that way. After the layoff, she realized she needed to program if she wanted to self-start her own projects. A friend taught her the basics. She learned the rest from YouTube and online forums.
Without that leap to learn a new skill, she believes she wouldn’t have been able to lift her game “off the ground.”
She credits another early decision—sharing her project before it was polished—for keeping her moving.
Her game was far from a complete build when she first posted. When she came up with the idea, she says she had “a couple of mockups and Figma,” and hadn’t even started her journey of learning how to program. She posted a video showing what she had, and it “got a few million views.”
The validation mattered. She says it was “really validating” to see that the idea appealed to others and that feedback helped shape her direction. It also made room for people to share their thoughts, informing the work she chose to do next.
Even as those wins piled up, her internal struggle wasn’t abstract.
For her, Meta wasn’t just an employer—it was a public signal. Going out in public, saying she worked for a Fortune 500 company made people take her more seriously and assume she was smart “without doing anything to prove it.” That gave her confidence.
Losing that role hit harder than she expected. She says losing the thing she thought made her valuable—and not having many friends around for support—put her in a dark place.
Then she met someone still working at Meta. When she told him she was making video games now, he said he “wished he could build projects he was really excited about and not just feel like a cog in the machine.”
Hearing that, she says, made her realize she should be proud of herself. She adds that perhaps she has “set the foundation for something great.”
The story ends where it has been building toward all along: a return to work, but on her terms.
Pitcher is currently partnering with a publisher to launch “Lily’s World XD” around the end of the year, working on projects she says she’s genuinely passionate about. She doesn’t pretend the layoff was harmless. She only argues that for her, the collapse became the opening.
She also carries one more message from the months after Meta: if she could go back, she would tell herself “things will be OK.”
She has an invitation for others, too. “Do you have a story to share about getting laid off from Meta? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.”
Meta layoff Emily Pitcher indie game developer Lily's World XD content designer TikTok brand deals voice acting coding entrepreneurship Los Angeles