Member-only story
“That is sacrosanct,” one of our investors, “Raul,” said to me. I had just told Raul that we were going to perform a layoff as part of our next funding round.
Raul was pleased to hear me state the obvious. We needed our funding to last at least 18 months, and, with the money we were likely to raise, the only way to do that was to layoff part of the staff.
Layoffs are your fault, not your employees fault.
I, on the other hand, was bummed. These were really good people that I was going to let go. Their lives would be changed forever, not because they had done anything wrong, but because I had failed them.
Nothing sucks more than laying people off or firing people.
You should start layoffs at the top of your organization, not the bottom.
My first step was sitting down with Tina, our controller, and figuring out exactly how much salary we needed to cut to get to our number. It’s a simple answer, but it’s not a straightforward answer, because you need to factor in the overhead associated with each employee.
After I had the amount of salary we needed to cut, I met with my direct reports as a group. I told them that we needed to…
