How do I lay people off?
venturehacks.com
venturehacks.com
Next, stop taking a salary, or recognize that you're accepting six figures while throwing people you recruited out into the worst economy in 50 years.
Finally, move your ass to find those people jobs. Carve out time to write real, personal recommendations for each of them. Introduce them to every company you have a relationship with. Sell.
God help you if you write, "it saddens me that we have to let these people go, because most of them were solid performers". If you kept dead wood in your company, likely to the detriment of the whole team, and couldn't muster up the courage to deal with them until the economy gave you an excuse, it's all on you, asshole.
Yeah, I sound like even more of a dick here than I normally do, but I don't think I'm the only one noticing the valley patting itself on the back for fucking people over.
[edit I'm not super happy with this comment, but I'm not deleting it either; might as well be honest about what I think. We have employees too. Maybe I'll be a total douche if something bad happens to us? Tell me you told me so.]
On the other hand, I think these things are relevant right now if there are people reading them that are venture backed and things look less rosy in their outlook.
I have much more respect for an employer that plans ahead and lets their employees know what's up significantly before they can't make the next month's payroll.
"Here's the deal. It's going to be hard to raise the next round. We've got to cut back. You've got jobs for another month and severance for a month after that. Let's sit down and talk about what you'd like to find for your next job and I'll push every contact I've got to help you find that."
I totally agree you shouldn't be a jerk and blog about it like, oh it was so tough for me, I had to fire so many people, the emotional agony it will inflict on me for the next couple weeks will be so hard. You have to recognize that no matter how hard it is for you, it's worse for them, something this blogger didn't seem to want to take on.
Startup founders seem to love calling themselves "CEOs". Working for a one-dollar salary during rough times is something that real CEOs actually sometimes do.
I agree with you D , pay cut makes sense, but not for an early stage startup CEO. Now outside executive on the other hand is different...
Is it hard to live on $1 a year? Well, it's not harder than living on $0 a year. But OK: how many of the Valley Layoff Heroes even took a pay cut down to sustenance wage? Note: normally when people do that, they tell everyone --- it's a morale boost.
You could do some consulting on the side, I suppose, but that would defeat the point of having employees. And as an employee, you're probably better off finding a job somewhere else than working at a company where the CEO has to spend part of his time working on something else just to get by.
I agree with the main point. Any "CEO" who lays off workers without first cutting his or her own salary down to the bare minimum is clearly not doing what's best for his or her company.
I think if you want to play with high-stakes, as is true in the startup game, you have to be willing to lose with dignity. Holding onto your shares, screwing your employees and still paying yourself just makes you a jackass.
Surely it was worse in the mid 70s to the early 80s, and again in the early 90s?
- Unemployment http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Us_...
- GDP per capita in 2000 $ http://qmarks.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/gdp-per-capita-in-oec...
I posit that the reason for this, in tech anyway, is that employees are generally in one of two categories: 1) Sales people with customer connections or 2) Developer/admin types who may have a lot of access to systems. In either of these cases the employer could be concerned that the possibly-terminated employee is going to damage the assets (contacts or code) that the company has.
If I could contribute a pattern from my limited experience it would be this: Companies tend to hire a hatchet-man a few months before layoffs start. It often looks like an incompetent manager "decided to spend more time with his family", or the creation of a new, often highly paid, middle manager position. After the new guy is in his place he lays off the people that he's {decided, been instructed} to, and then moves on, often because he's burnt out from doing all of the dirt work that the managers above him are too weak to do.
In both companies the person who was hired as a hatchet man would have been a far better manager than the one who sailed the ship into the iceberg in the first place. If as an employer you don't see your manager as capable of doing this hard job (layoffs), how do you expect them to do the hard day to day job of managing performance? Just keeping the house clean can save that first round of layoffs that often consists of the low performers, and without the horrible morale crush of pink slips.
Heh, both times in fact those who got the chop counted themselves - and were viewed by former cow-orkers - as the lucky ones.
A pretty sad state of affairs... it's not like you can't leave by yourself and go do something more worthwhile, if you're that unhappy...
The second time was the company shifting from products to services. They said you can have X months money and leave now, or X/2 months paid to find a job somewhere else in the company (and then nothing). I didn't look back. In both cases, senior managers know they're in trouble but think they can get themselves out, there's still plenty of cash in the kitty and they need to preserve the appearance of confidence, so they'll pay fair severances. When it gets desperate - then it's everyone for themselves.
Don't be afraid to say that.
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full...
Then...
blog about it, become an internet fad, get lots of free press / attention, attract customers, expand business, hire more devs.
Plus, some people might not mind so much if you tell them first thing Monday morning that they have to go home. :)