Is California a Harbinger of the AI Job Disruption?: Justin Fox

If venture capital investment is a measure of the economic future, California would seem to have locked things up. In the first quarter of this year — by far the biggest quarter for US VC investment ever — an unheard-of 85% of the money went to California companies, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. For all of 2025, California’s share was an also-unprecedented 60%.

But employment in the industries toward which all this investment is flowing — technology, broadly defined — has been headed mostly in the opposite direction. California has shed 107,900 jobs since August 2022, an 11% ...