On May 29, 2023, Bitwise Industries, once the face of technology in Fresno, collapsed, abandoning nearly 1,000 employees, mostly in California’s central San Joaquin Valley
Paola Zarza Mora didn’t know what to make of the emergency meeting her employer, Bitwise Industries, called on Memorial Day evening in 2023 – but she had a bad feeling.
Looking back exactly one year later, she remembers some of her team members were hopeful. Maybe they were announcing good news about the company’s future?
But she felt suspicious. In hindsight, there had been red flags leading up to that meeting: an abrupt transition from direct deposit to paper checks that didn’t have detailed pay stubs. The sudden end to a benefit program making donations in employee’s names.
“Something’s wrong,” she recalled thinking.
Not everyone even saw the meeting invite that day, although it bore life-altering news for former employees of the now-bankrupt Fresno tech company.
Jenn Guerra was on a birthday trip in the Bay Area and missed the meeting when texts started to rain in from her coworkers about furloughs.
“I Googled what ‘furloughed’ means. I didn’t know,” she said. “They’re like, I don’t know what’s going on. They just said we can’t work anymore – and our checks are gonna bounce.”
David Ramirez, who got his first full-time job out of college for Bitwise’s marketing team, had just returned to Fresno from a trip when he saw the email.
“I was just kind of relaxing, mentally getting myself ready for the next day – there wouldn’t be one.”
Those three employees were hundreds of miles apart when Bitwise’s co-founders Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr. broke the news in a virtual meeting that all 900 of the company’s employees were getting furloughed.
But soon, the employees all ended up in the exact same place.
After years of stable – and generous – pay and believing in the capitalism-with-a-heart dream of Bitwise, they were back at square one.
Less than a month later, those 900 employees were officially laid off as Bitwise filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Soberal and Olguin have since pleaded not guilty to defrauding investors of $100 million. Their attorneys are attempting to negotiate plea deals before the ex-CEOs’ next appearance in federal court July 18.
While the courts decide Soberal and Olguin’s fate – which could come with up to 20 years in prison – hundreds of their former employees have had their own altered futures to reckon with.
Some who spoke with Fresnoland said they found new employment over the past 12 months.
Some stayed in tech – or, in a few cases, even continued working in downtown Fresno out of the old Bitwise buildings.
Others haven’t been so lucky and are still hunting for jobs.
All are still dealing with the catastrophic consequences of the company’s sudden collapse in one way or another, whether that’s in their struggle to pay bills or to place trust in a new employer.
Life after Bitwise: ‘They did exactly the opposite of what they hoped to do’
Bitwise was once credited with bringing the tech industry to the Central Valley in earnest.
“A tech company in Fresno of all places – how crazy,” Ramirez, 28, said he recalled thinking before he became a student in Bitwise’s “Geekwise” classes in coding and web development.
Not only that, but Soberal and Olguin made it their express mission to usher underrepresented communities into tech jobs through apprenticeships and coding bootcamps.
In a 2021 TED Talk, Olguin marketed her own success story blazing a trail in the tech industry as a “poor, queer, Brown woman from nowhere” as part of Bitwise’s secret formula for uplifting “underdog cities” through job training.
And people bought it.
A lot of people, in Fresno and beyond. The company secured government contracts, partnered with local schools and received praise in national publications.
ut after that fateful Memorial Day meeting one year ago, 600 Fresno tech jobs disappeared overnight.
Laid-off Bitwise employees worried the Central Valley would lose some of that talent the company squandered.
“I was on LinkedIn the minute the furloughs happened,” said Leah Sadoian, 32, a former content writer on Bitwise’s marketing team.
“I posted something about saying, what happened really sucks, but the Valley has this incredible opportunity to tap into 600 super talented, very smart, very hardworking individuals. You shouldn’t pass up that opportunity because we’ll go somewhere else.”
It remains unclear how many Bitwise workers found opportunities in the area.
As for Sadoian, she managed to stay in Fresno and landed another job relatively quickly. By July, she started a remote position – still in content writing – at a cybersecurity company.
But she misses working for a company with Central Valley ties, not to mention the inclusivity Bitwise once prided itself on.
“There was no company that did diversity and inclusion like Bitwise did. They were, like, radically inclusive,” she said, “which was amazing for so many of us because we had never been in workplaces like that before.
“A lot of us struggle with going back into ‘normal’ workplaces when we realize that’s not a thing that we get,” she said. “It’s kind of up to us to create those spaces again.”
Still, she considers herself one of the lucky ones as far as the brevity of her job search.
“I don’t take it lightly,” she said. “I know some of my friends still are not in full-time work, or are contracting or in between jobs.”
That’s true for former Bitwise employee Megan Steinert, 44, who’s still looking for full-time employment one year later.
Steinert still remembers her first conversation with Olguin, hearing about her and Soberal’s visions for the company.
“They knew that people could thrive in their own towns if they were just given opportunities,” she said. “It was a beautiful vision, and I wanted to do everything I could to be a part of it.”
Steinert worked at Bitwise’s Bakersfield office, managing the co-working space. She said Olguin never asked to see her resume before she got the job in 2020.
When the dream Olguin sold to Steinert and so many others went up in flames three years later, it took Steinert time to grieve before she could even think about looking for work.
“It felt like we were in (a) relationship with a toxic, narcissist, gaslighting partner in the end of it all,” she said, “because they did exactly the opposite of what they hoped to do.”
Steinert, like other employees Fresnoland spoke to, relied on unemployment insurance to keep her “from drowning” in the immediate aftermath.
But after a while, those payments ran out. While she continues her job search, she’s relying on family for financial support.
“I have found a very part-time job that gives me like an hour a day,” she said. “I can’t even count how many applications I’ve sent in, and I’ve only had four interviews in total in the last year.”
Bitwise’s footprint in downtowns across California
In addition to bringing tech dollars to the Valley, some also credit Bitwise with breathing new life into Fresno’s struggling downtown.
Bitwise’s bright, recognizable buildings on Van Ness Avenue, Ventura Avenue, and R Street weren’t like traditional downtown offices aimed at government employees, said Will Dyck, president of Baltara Enterprises. His company constructed the four former Bitwise buildings.
“What we were building for Bitwise is very different than most of our other buildings in downtown Fresno,” he said.
“The Bitwise buildings were a little bit more hip and fun and bright colors. It was just a different feel, and that product type had really not been built extensively downtown.”
Bitwise sold their ownership stake in the buildings to Baltara in 2019, making the tech company just a tenant of the buildings that then subleased some of their space to other companies.
When Bitwise suddenly went under in 2023, Baltara took over maintaining three of the four buildings in the company’s absence.
Some initially feared Bitwise’s abrupt collapse might trigger a downtown exodus, but it never happened.
“The biggest gap that Bitwise left was employment, in that they had so many people working for them. That took a lot of people out of the workforce of downtown Fresno. But from a real estate perspective,” he said, “nothing’s changed. We were able to backfill 75% of all the space within 12 months.”
The South Stadium building on Van Ness Avenue is 100% occupied with 32 tenants, Dyck said.
The BeeHive on Ventura Avenue, which consists of both office and warehouse space, has 16 tenants and no vacancies in the office space. Baltara is still searching for a tenant for the 30,000 square-foot warehouse.
Factory 41, right across the street from the Hive building, is roughly 65% occupied with 11 tenants.
About 20 of the current tenants across the three buildings were already subleasing space from Bitwise prior to the collapse and opted to renew their leases with Baltara, Dyck said. The company also found 25 new tenants in 12 months to fill Bitwise’s old spaces.
As for the fourth Bitwise building – the State Center Warehouse on R Street – it’s owned by a subsidiary of Texas-based company NICbyte LLC. The City of Fresno’s Capital Projects Department entered a lease agreement for part of that space in December 2023.
NICbyte is suing Bitwise for breach of contract related to the R Street building and other Bitwise buildings across California.
On top of being Bitwise’s former landlord, Dyck was a board member for the company in 2018. He’s now one of its largest creditors in the bankruptcy case and is owed about $63 million in rent.
He said that despite the “spectacular firework show” that was the end of Bitwise, he’s glad its former office spaces are thriving – and in some cases, still occupied by former Bitwise employees.
“It’s nice to see people still committed to working in downtown,” he said.
‘Trust issues’ and new entrepreneurial endeavors from former Bitwise workers
For some ex-Bitwise employees, the thought of working for another company – putting their lives and futures in the hands of other people who may or may not prove deserving of that – was hard to fathom.
“A lot of the people that were affected by this still hold some sort of trauma,” said Zarza Mora, who worked out of Bitwise’s Merced office, “and especially now have trust issues with any organization.”
Ramirez, the former Geekwise student turned graphic designer for the company, decided to pursue freelance graphic design in the wake of the layoffs.
“Everything is my fault, for better or for worse,” he said. “If I end up living in a box under a bridge from freelancing, at least then … I could have done something about it.”
Guerra, 49, had experience as a solo entrepreneur even before working for Bitwise. She’s run her own massage business for over 20 years.
After the collapse, she along with two other former Bitwise employees launched Reclaim Technologies, a tech startup that builds websites and apps for clients.
It’s now just Guerra at the helm while her partners have left to do other things, she said. But she makes a point to work with former Bitwise employees whenever she needs to contract with a developer.
Guerra runs Reclaim out of a small space in one of Bitwise’s former buildings on Van Ness.
“I love this building. I have a lot of good memories here, and it doesn’t make me feel weird or creeped out,” she said. “I didn’t make those choices – I didn’t falsify documents or lie. I just try to look at the positive.”
Like many Bitwise refugees, Guerra keeps up with the headlines coming out of Soberal and Olguin’s criminal case and regularly attends the hearings.
“There needs to be justice,” she said. “It can’t just be like, ‘you can do whatever the hell you want.’
“There (are) 900 families that were hurt, and we never got paid back. There needs to be some kind of retribution, something to give justice to everyone.”
Neither Ramirez nor Guerra hide the fact that they used to work for Bitwise from potential clients or future employers, even though sometimes it raises eyebrows.
“Despite how everything went down,” Ramirez said, “it was still five years of my life.
“It’s still a place where I learned and grew.”