Jeff Cotton

So for those of you who haven't, which is most of you in the room, don't.

Don't get yourself into this situation.

But if you have to, it's doable and you can survive it.

I believe in the old Peter Drucker quote that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

To me, it is all about the people.

Ultimately, you can have the best strategy.

You can have great product and you're going to struggle if you don't have a great team.

But if you do have to lay people off, look, first of all, you as a founder, as a CEO have to own the message.

You've got to stand up in front of the team and say, look.

We have struggled, we have failed in whatever way or area in which you failed, you've gotta own that message.

And you also have to treat people really great as you're exiting them.

One of the things that we did is we made sure everyone kept their equity so that they felt like they still had a piece of something, that they still had a share for the work that they had done to get us to where we were.

And actually many of those people actually were paid in our exit ultimately, which was really critical.

The other thing I would tell you is, unfortunately, the company did have to do a reduction before I joined and I had to do one more.

But rest assured, when I did mine, it was the last one.

When you do these, you've got to go as deep as you possibly can.

So the company was about 200 people before I joined.

I took it to 29.

And that was at 5 million in revenue.

We went down to 29 people and it was probably 80% of the 29 that were left were developers.