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Comment by aleksiy123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious. Is there any other options? By this point it's too late, right? And even if they played it safe there is always some risk.

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> Is there any other options?

Have a compelling product that generates revenue. Unless your workforce is 100% saturated and you don't really _need_ that many engineers, lay-offs are one step above cutting free snacks on the usefulness scale when it comes to trying to stop bleeding.

Have a compelling product that generates profit. Any product is compelling when subsidized heavily enough by VCs.

VC money is there until it isn’t. See the YC message from last week.

Packaged dreams and hopes as a product ceases to be investible with high interest rate / high inflation.

I think you mean profit, not revenue. In terms of surviving difficult economics, revenue is useless if not accompanied by profit. Cutting 33% of their workforce will at least temporarily stop an awful lot of bleeding. Long term effect, probably not good. If losing 33% doesn't hurt them long term, then they have been doing some incredibly bad hiring. They might make it to the other side of this and I know nothing about their specific situation, but judging from the history of other failures, this is sadly often the first step in a death spiral.

1. Startups without runway will die.

2. Public companies will cut the fat, cut “dream” projects, to protect their stock price. The further the money, the more risk to the employee.

3. Things could get a lot worse.

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