One of SV's strengths is cutting your highly qualified and experienced staff loose to go do something else.

That's never how layoffs are done. If you survive them your workload just increases and the employees picked are based on nothing or something arbitrary.

Then your company has a reputation for being unreliable for stable employment and people that can pick where they want to go will go else where. It also kills morale and remaining high performers will go somewhere else. Now the company laying off is stuck with low performers that don't have other options.