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“You can often pick up significant market share in an economic downturn by just staying alive,” top startup accelerator Y Combinator wrote in an internal e-mail to its founders this week. The advice was one of ten bullet points in a memo meant to help companies navigate the economic downturn crushing tech. Other stand-out quotes include “plan for the worst” and “no one can predict how bad the economy will get, but things don’t look good.”

The email is a vibe shift from just a few weeks ago, when hundreds of Y Combinator startups — many of which already raised venture funding — presented themselves to the public on Demo Day. The startups were the first to receive Y Combinator’s new $500,000 standard check and were aggressively focused on international opportunity. Now, YC is saying that “this slow down will have a disproportionate impact on international companies,” among others.

While Y Combinator’s memo wasn’t meant to be public, it isn’t the only one publishing a Black Swan Memo in preparation for what’s to come. TechCrunch obtained a series of memos that venture capitalist firms sent to portfolio companies about the market downturn. Some were hopeful, some were simple, and others were a vibe check as straightforward as, Can you tell us your ARR and cash-burn in writing? Pretty please?

I explored this topic in my most recent TechCrunch+ column, “It's not business as usual (and investors are admitting it)." Subscribe to Equity for a podcast version of this conversation next week as well! In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll address more layoffs at tech companies, ghosts showing up to $44 billion dates, and Swyft startups. As always, you can support me by forwarding this newsletter to a friend or following me on Twitter or my blog.