What founders can learn from Anjuna’s layoffs and recovery

In 2021, Anjuna Security was increasing fast, hiring aggressively, and chasing a marketplace that seemed limitless. By the extremity of that year, the venture-backed cybersecurity institution had scaled to astir 75 employees, gathering retired sales, lawsuit success, and enactment teams successful anticipation of continued hypergrowth.

Then 2022 hit.

As the marketplace turned, endeavor clients became harder to land. Like galore startups gathering astatine that time, Anjuna was overextended and underfunded. So the institution was forced to marque a hard determination and laid disconnected a information of its staff, past conducted different circular of layoffs months later. 

Cutting costs was lone portion of the challenge. The harder question was however to rebound and support the remaining squad members motivated. 

Ayal Yogev, the CEO and co-founder of Anjuna, joined Isabelle Johannessen connected TechCrunch’s Build Mode to sermon however the institution survived the volatile marketplace by acting quickly, making cuts with compassion, and learning from aboriginal missteps.

One of the reasons Anjuna was capable to endure 2 rounds of layoffs was that the institution had already enactment successful the clip to physique a beardown interior culture, anchored successful a elemental idea. “We person lone 1 connection erstwhile it comes to culture, and that’s care,” Yogev said. “We attraction astir our employees. We attraction astir our customers.”

Rather than treating civilization arsenic a acceptable of abstract values, the institution focused connected accordant behavior. Internally, that meant transparency and communicating intelligibly astir what was happening and why. Externally, it meant supporting departing employees beyond severance, from sharing occupation opportunities done capitalist networks to ensuring continued entree to benefits similar healthcare.

Crucially, the institution avoided communal pitfalls that erode spot during layoffs similar prolonged uncertainty, impersonal processes, oregon soundlessness from leadership. Instead, decisions were made quickly, and conversations were handled directly. 

Even so, the interaction was real. A 2nd circular of layoffs made rebuilding spot much difficult. But the civilization that was already established shaped however the remaining squad responded. Rather than focusing connected blame, the accent was connected learning: what went wrong, and however to debar repeating it.

“There’s benignant of 2 things radical do, similar the benignant of worst companies are looking for idiosyncratic to blasted and that ever ends up creating a civilization of radical are conscionable trying to not marque mistakes,” Yogev said. “Just creates a civilization of blaming, which is conscionable wholly counterproductive, right?”

Today, Anjuna is rebuilding with a antithetic approach. Hiring is much deliberate. Sales maturation is tied intimately to existent demand. And caller tools, including AI, are helping the squad run much efficiently without overexpanding.

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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Build Mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a peculiar acknowledgment to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.