Startups Anonymous Est. 2013 · Read-only archive
Stories

Bad hiring decisions lead to mass layoff

I started my startup 4 years ago. At the time I didn’t know much about tech and although we are profitable we experienced massive scaling issues.

I now hired a new team and replaced my whole previous team (10 people) with better ones. The process took 8 months and was rough for all sides. The fault is clearly on my side as I hired these people before, but once I saw that they couldn’t perform the tasks I wanted them to do it was clear to let them go. As an entrepreneur, you have to sometimes decide between going bankrupt or letting everyone else go.

3 answers from the community

AAnonymous· Jun 27, 2018

A profitable startup can attract much better engineers. Would you have been able to assemble your current time 4 years ago? Probably not. So don't beat yourself up over it.

AAnonymous· Jul 11, 2018

You dont fire people who supported you when you needed them.

AAnonymous· Jul 29, 2018

Dont see anything wrong with it. Its something decision makers need to shoulder for survival.

The fact you expressed this story comes down to showing two things:

Acknowledging a better way to mitigate similar incident from happening is a good sign if improvement.

Good luck,

Chap