The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Managing Uncertainty -- Layoffs and Talent

Episode Date: May 26, 2016

In many ways, managing startups is about managing uncertainty: in product, market, and... people. So what happens when changes in the business require changes -- and sometimes reductions -- in the workforce? In this episode of the podcast, a16z partners Shannon Schiltz and Alex Rampell share both their professional and personal experiences with layoffs -- from why they happen to what to do (and what not to do). Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. Today's topic is managing uncertainty, layoffs, and talent management. Startups in many ways by definition are about managing disruption and uncertainty with things changing with technologies, markets, customers, business, and people. So what happens when those business changes require changes in the workforce? In this episode, we focus on the topics of the frequency and magnitude and reasons for layoffs to communicating about them with employees. Joining us for the conversation are A6 and Z partner Shannon Schilts, who heads up our people practices team, and that basically encompasses everything from HR to performance management to things like immigration and her team also manages our technical talent network. Shannon also has a lot of experience as a

former HR executive because she used to work at Opsware. And then we also have Alex Rampeau, who's one of our newer general partners and most recently was the co-founder and CEO of Trial Pay, where they went through quite a few changes as well. So that's the introductions. Let's just get started. One of the things that's commonly happening right now is reductions in the workforce or riffs layoffs. And they happen for many, many different reasons. What reasons are those? Yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, the workforce, your employee workforce is like the most expensive expense that any technology company has. It's all about the people. So if a company gets to the point where they need to reduce their cost and reduce their burn, the biggest thing you can

do is reduce the number of heads working for the company. So that's one reason. That's one reason. You can also, you know, we've had companies and we've seen companies in the industry that have, you know, hired with the goal of building a feature or a product and then pivoted. So they have this great engineering team or sales team and they're not actually going to build the product. And then they're not going to sell it. So you need to actually, you know, reduce that team. Because they have expertise in one area, but now they've got to a different model. And you need to hire a different skill set. You could have, you know, a product that is late in shipping, so your business roles might not be, you know, you might have hired aggressively and you're just not ready to utilize those skills yet.

There's a lot of – You don't have a lot of – Yeah, for example. Sometimes, I mean, there are almost three different forms of people in the company. There's kind of fat muscle and bone of the body. And sometimes you do get to a stage as a company where you might have people that aren't carrying their weight. They're not actually doing what you would hope for them to do. but performance reviews have not ever happened.

I wouldn't even call it a riff, but we did a layoff of some people on our team that we just didn't think we're performing, and we should have done that a long, long time ago. This is actually when results were great, but we never got around to actually enacting performance reviews. And I would say from the HR standpoint, I hope that companies don't do it that way. That's probably the worst way. That's one of the worst reasons you could do a layoff. Especially when you actually do have a riff for not performance of the individual. but really performance of the company.

Now, that having been said, when you're doing something like a RIF for the performance of the company, in many cases, of course, you do take into account the performance of the individuals. Like you're not, if there's somebody that keeps the lights on and if that person left, the entire company would fall apart, that's the last person to go down with the ship. Well, let's technically define what is a RIF. I know it stands for a reduction in workforce. There's many times types of, you know, changing the company's employee base. But how do you define that specifically for people who weren't in HR and who haven't run a company?

Yeah, so I think, you know, a riff or a layoff or job eliminations, there's a whole bunch of different names. They're all the same thing, which is you're reducing your headcount. It can be anywhere from, you know, I would say from five on. A group of five people. A group of five people or more. I think a lot of times if you're doing less than that, a lot of times you are just like maybe course correcting, your performance managing, you're doing something not necessarily classified as a riff and you don't necessarily need to get in front of the company and say we're doing a reduction. I think once you see a larger number, people are going to take note and see that a lot of people or more than a couple people were impacted on the same day. And if you're not transparent about what went down, people will start to assume something's going on with the company and it might not be the right messaging that you want people to think about.

So, I mean, should a CEO as supposed to communicate every time people have to leave the company? Well, we did because what we didn't want to have is I remember somebody at my company. It was from Argentina, and he said he didn't want to be like the desaparacidos of, like, Argentina. What does that mean? Basically, people would disappear in the middle of the night. This was during, like, the Civil War. And then you'd never hear from just like, where did they go? Well, that happens sometimes in companies.

And everyone looks around, like, confused. And you actually, these stories start traveling. Like, what happened? There's still some of the big companies that are doing it. We know of one that just last week did it that way. Wow. Unfortunately, one time we had somebody leave the company who had committed a serious felony, literally to the point where the sheriff came to our office, arrested the person,

and then took out all of his things. Like, there's still a box in the sheriff's office somewhere that has, like, lots and lots of stuff. Like, can we do a big announcement to the company and explain, like, the reasons for the arrest? Like, no, that was the most awkward one. Hopefully that will never happen again. But generally speaking, we would always send out a note, and we would craft that with the person that was being like, oh, it's a little bit different when you're doing a group of people. I wouldn't counter your point on it's not a good idea to go take a batch of five people and eliminate them for performance reasons.

But also what we didn't want to have happen is that if we staggered, eventually as we got more mature as an organization, we would have performance reviews at a regular cadence. But if we said, okay, you know, this week, this person's work wasn't up to snuff, and that was like week number 12 in a row. And then the next week the same thing happened. Then it did look like this bizarre, staggered, uncoordinated process. And it was like, doesn't this company know what they're doing? Like if there are five people that aren't carrying their weight, like it's probably better and easier to kind of message that in one fell swoop as opposed to the, you know, Desaparacidos problem. Right. Disappearing and slightly into the night. Right. But Shannon, why did you say that was a bad practice in the first place?

Performance management driven riffs? Yeah. Well, one, I think it shows from a cultural standpoint, it says that you don't necessarily care enough about your employees to give them real-time feedback. Second, it more plays into all of a sudden people are being let go. you don't openly communicate to a company and let people like naturally absorb the fact that we're going to do a reduction. A reduction is done quickly. It's done efficiently. And it is like you're notified and walked out at the door. So that means that the way that you're dealing with people who aren't performing is you're telling them the day of that you're not performing and we're letting you go, which then causes panic in the organization. People start to question, can I be let go? Am I not performing to the expectations of my managers? It's a cultural thing that you try and

stay away from performance-related riffs. So just some background on trial pay, you know, we were doing great until we weren't. And then eventually we turned it around and the company was successful. But for us, what happened was there were a bunch of companies. If everybody remembers social gaming, trial pay was one of the biggest companies that was handling all monetization for social games. One of our biggest companies was a company, one of our biggest clients was a company called Playfish.

Playfish gets bought by EA. Social gaming runs into problems. EA shuts down Playfish. multi-multimillion dollar revenue stream for them and also for us get shut down. Zinga, their own revenue goes down by 70%. If you're selling a product and you can control your destiny and sell more stuff, then great, you can sell more stuff. If you are selling something to somebody who's selling something to somebody who's selling something, if you're like the second order derivative and like your clients of your clients start to suffer, like there's nothing you can do.

You can just like hope and pray to the gods of like, please let these people sell more things. I can't make people play Farmville, and unfortunately they stopped playing Farmville. So we went through some challenges where just our revenue, which tripled in one year, went down a little bit, then went down a lot. And it was very, very hard to predict this. And there was a big shift at the same time happening to Mobile. So we were confronted with this problem of we didn't have the revenue that we thought we were going to have.

We knew that there was nothing we could do to affect that because we had this second-order derivative problem of we were just two steps away from the end consumer. You know, we did have to do a number of riffs, but the problem was, I mean, obviously, it's kind of, everybody knows you shouldn't do death by a million riffs. You just don't know necessarily how, like, you don't necessarily know how bad it's going to go. And the easiest thing to do is say,

you look at your organization and you say, okay, well, we clearly don't need these 20 people or these 10 people right now, based on the situation that you see right now, and obviously it's going to get better because you wouldn't go start a company if you weren't an optimist, if you were just a devout pessimist, you would never start a company. So it's going to get better. Oh, wait, it hasn't gotten better. And then you have to cut again. And then you have to cut again. And then across that entire time, like the biggest challenge for me was actually not the riffs.

The biggest challenge was losing people that were very, very good because the morale of the company went down so, it's just so much. And the morale of the company goes down when you do multiple riffs. Like, it's a circular argument here. So, you know, I get people asking, what's the right? right way to do it. And to counter not being the pessimist, but not being as optimistic as a founder CEO, is you have to model for your worst case scenario. Say, numbers don't turn around tomorrow, right? How deep do you need to go if everything stays the way it is today or decreases slightly so that you don't have to get in front of your workforce and announce another RIF? You can't people, your good talent starts to leave when they see a RIF.

another riff and another riff because they want stability. And good talent also has a choice. They do. They do anywhere you want at any time. Those are the folks that you don't want to lose. And so as hard as it is, you have to, you can't just decide today and do it on Friday. You have to do the financial modeling. You have to think about doomsday.

And you have to find the happy middle on it. So you can cut at least to get, so you're not doing it in another six months. Right. So you describe it, Shannon, as the death by the thousand cuts. So you don't want to do like a bunch of little riffs. You would rather do like a bulk at once. Can you walk us through the process? So what is this?

Like what step one, what step two? What's it? There's communication. There's this modeling. Like how does this sort of play out step by step? You know, we actually do have a, you know, a timeline in a playbook on this. But it's, you know, when it's figuring out, do you need to do a reduction. Does it make sense to a reduction?

Are there other things you can do? What are some of the other things you can do, you can, you know, like some of the freebie stuff that goes on in the office? I mean, are there, how significant are your cuts? Like, how significant of a. cut do you need to make in your cash flow or your burn? So once you decide you are going to do a RIF, there's internal communication. You also have to think about, okay, how many do we cut and what are the dollar amounts associated? It's actually a really complex process. So there's internal communication, there's standing in front of the company and talking to your employees,

there's talking to the employees who are impacted, talking to the employees who are staying, there's focusing on morale, then there's press. There's like a whole bunch of different communication plans that need to be figured out. Then there's, you know, the legal aspect, which there's tons of legal pieces in a reduction. What are some of the high level just, you know, basic no-noes that you can never do in a RIF or that you should do NARIF legally? Well, one, you want to make sure that there's no adverse impact. So there's, you need to do a lot of reporting around who's being impacted, ethnic backgrounds, age. You want to get signed releases from folks. You have to look at affordability for severance. And then you have to look at on top

of that, like if you stay under 50 in California, you don't need to give a certain amount of notice. If you are reducing more than 50, you have to give 60 days notice or paid out in severance. So it's actually a really complex thing. In terms of just how to do this and how to do this right, what I learned was, again, like going back to this optimism versus pessimism thing, if you're starting a company and you're going and hiring people and you're getting great engineers and salespeople and business development people away from places like Google where, almost in every case they're making more money. I mean, you're getting them for two reasons.

One, you're getting them for mission, hopefully, and then in which case, everything becomes easier around morale and everything else. But that's not always the case. In many cases, you're getting them because they see, okay, I'm giving up something here, but I'm going to own 1% of the company, or I'm going to own 0.5% of the company. And you know what? If you own 0.5% of Google, that would be worth what, you know? Billions of dollars.

So I think $2.5 billion by my count. So you're giving somebody a chance to, like, and this is what Silicon Valley is really built on. You're taking a loss right now to hopefully, you know, roll the dyes for something in the future. Now, the problem is that when the company starts to foot fault, and this isn't even the RIF thing, this is more of like your sales could go down. Of course, it gets worse if you have a mismanaged RIF or a series of RIFs. But even with one RIF, I mean, you have a foot fault, and people thought you were going up into the right in perpetuity. Now they're like, wait a minute, like, what is this equity actually?

actually worth. And now I'm getting underpaid. It's actually funny when I see a startup and they come and they say, okay, here's my OPEC plan. Their OPEC plan is based on they're going to pay people series A or C salaries in perpetuity. And what they don't realize is that people are going to say after three or four years, it's like, okay, I've got this equity and that's great. But you know what? I need to go buy a house. And that's a lot harder to do. Especially if you haven't gotten the liquidity out. Well, to that point, really quick, because we've moved on to a compensation topic, which is you have to be very careful. I'm sure you agree with this. At seed stage in A round, a lot of companies will give the option of, do you want more options or more cash? And they'll figure out the equation and give

somebody more options and keep them at a reduced cash rate. Once you start approaching your B round or two to three years into it, everyone gets brought up to market. So, like, you only get a discount for a certain amount of time before everyone comes to market because people cannot afford to live on a discounted cash income. But the point is, I think, interesting because it's a connection between what happens to the morale and how that turns then into a salary conversation. What's your view on tying those two? Is that a mistake to link them? I actually think, to Alex's point, I think there's a third thing. There's the mission. There's the equity. But I think the third piece, and this is where I do a lot of coaching on the RIF topic, people come to work for the founders. They truly believe,

if you can actually do a riff the right way and everyone that you want to keep feels like everyone who is reduced or impacted was treated with respect on the way out the door, you can keep your great employees because they came to work for you. And if you're treating everyone with respect, they'll stay with you. And this was, you know, at Ops where we went through, I think, three reductions. You did. Yeah. And it was at the end, when we sold to HP, everyone that went over in that cell would still, to this day, probably walk off a cliff. for Ben. Well, that's amazing. Right. Because as a CEO, as a CEO, people believe in your vision and they believe that you know what you're doing. You've read his book, The Struggle. Like, he didn't always know what the right answer was, but his employees always felt that he did. The thing I say to our founders and CEOs is that every person who's joined this company joined you. They might be working for someone else, but they believe in the company you said you were going to build. So, you know, you guys have both referenced communication and believing in the founder. is the founder then the right person to get in front of the company and communicate, or someone else?

What's the founder? It's the CEO. The most important thing is you want to control the communication that's going out to your entire workforce, which means one person needs to stand up and communicate to everyone. What's going on that day? Why it's taking place. And that you as a CEO and founder, it was one of the hardest decisions you've made. What's the right balance? I mean, are you supposed to be very matter of fact and sort of clinical? Are you supposed to be a little emotional? I mean, do you feel like, do employees feel doubtful if they see the CEO kind of tearing up in the middle? Should they be a little, you know, very HR, like, not to be mean, Shannon, but honestly like a lot of. Yeah, a lot of HR people come off very like, okay, and here's a paperwork and you're done, and you've got to sign it. And there's legal reasons for that. So what's the right balance here? And I mean, I know there's no right answer, but what's the best practice? Shannon can probably answer the HR aspects of that very, very well. I mean, for me, it was more of how do we still communicate? I mean, to your point, like, people are showing up to work for this mission, for the founders, for everything else that they really signed up for. How do we show that there's still a plan to win? Because if you just kind of say like, hey, we had to do this, because we have to cut costs and, yep, that's what we got to do. Sorry, time to go back to work. Like, you're not going to have a very motivated workforce at that point in time. And I'd say that in most cases, people understood, I mean, even the people being let go, I remember the first time we did one of these, I mean, I literally didn't sleep the night before. And because there were some people, like, there was somebody who had worked for me for a very,

very long time who was terrific, but she didn't really have that much to do anymore just given what the company was going through. And that was a really, really tough one. But she was, She just said, you know, I totally understand. I mean, like, I know where things are and, like, you've been great to me and, you know, thank you. I must have made it worse for you in some ways. No, it made it better because I just felt like I was an evil person and, you know, here's somebody that's been tremendously loyal to me. Like, one of the things that we did do is the amount, I mean, I don't know if maybe Shannon can tell me this is a terrible idea. I wish I had had had her advice.

No, but we gave more severance for the more time that they had been with the company. So for somebody that had been there for seven years, we gave them even more severance, as opposed to somebody that had been there for one year or two years. I mean, I think we were still generous with everybody. The thing that a lot of people don't understand about generosity with severance or like they look at what Netflix does where it's like, hey, we're going to pay your manager to fire you or something like that. And if you have four months of cash left as a company,

and like you just can't do this. Right. That's the hardest conversation. You get excoriated by the press by your employees sometimes. It's like, oh, my God, I can't believe you gave a person X only two months of severance. in most of America, you don't get two months of severance. So first of all, this actually is very generous. It isn't generous by like, we're going to pay you for two years to leave, kind of Netflix style.

There are a publicly traded company worth tens of billions of dollars. And that's the other thing that I found very, very challenging, which is like, you know, the generosity that I think we were showing people was really, really hurting the finances of the company. And, you know, how do you deal with that where it's like, okay, we want to be generous. We want to, like, reward people. And also, like, you do want people to just, like, more as a practical matter, like, you have a release and they get the severance if they sign the release. You can imagine a private unicorn type company does a layoff. And it's like, all of these people only gave three months of severance. But what if they only have, you know, a year of cash left?

Anything else would be just irresponsible? And let me tell you, there's no company doing three months severance these days. So what's the standard? I get asked this question. It depends. It is, this goes back to, it takes a lot of planning to do a reduction. And affordability is so important. important because if you do a reduction and you're super generous because you want people to feel

respected and loved on the way out the door, you're giving yourself less runway to actually make it as a company. And so as hard as it is, like we can see companies doing anywhere from two weeks to, you know, I would say typical is a month. Because most companies aren't doing a reduction because they wake up one morning and say, you know what? We just have too many people. It's usually driven by cash. And so it's, it's, you can't be super generous. Are there other things you can do to make it better besides just offering kind words and helping walk them out with carrying boxes? Like, can you offer them contacts? I have, so I have the HR side and then I have the talent side.

So any company who's doing a reduction, part of their FAQs is that it's an email alias to set up that goes directly to my team. Anyone who reaches out to my team, we get on the phone with them, we help them with their resumes, we help them get introductions to companies. It's about giving back. Like you joined one of our portfolio companies. You gave everything you could. and we want to help you. And that's a huge thing for our CEOs to be able to say. There's the day of and then the day after.

And as soon as a CEO stands up and starts saying, we're doing a reduction. The coach and I give us is that everyone in that room is going to hear about two or three more things. So you ask, should you show emotions? You have to be real with your employees. Like obviously it is a hard thing that you're doing. It's a hard decision. Communicate two or three things about what's going to go on during the day. And by two or three things, you mean just because they're,

They're not going to hear past a certain point. They can't hear anything like nobody comes into work expecting to hear from their founder, CEO, that a reduction is going on. Right. And so, but then you want to bring everyone back together as quickly as possible to go through the go-forward plan. You know, you still have to have a plan to get people to believe what you're doing. So kind of walk us through the mechanics of this.

I mean, just start from the beginning for again. So you begin with the modeling and the people in the room for that modeling are the CEO, the CFO, the HR person, anybody else? It depends. I mean, I always say you want to keep the circle of no as tight as you can for as long as you can, but obviously a lot of times you need leaders of other groups to weigh in on who's, what teams are we keeping and what teams do we need to let go? Right.

So you bring them in. Okay, so that's a step one. Then you have the communication. And you said there's about a minimum of two weeks required between those. Typically, hopefully. And then you have the communication plan. And what actually, again, just what are the mechanics of it? Like, you call people into the HR person calls me.

No, so the way that we, like the playbook that I run with is first thing in the morning, which is typically, you know, Silicon Valley style nine or ten o'clock in the morning, you have an all-hands meeting. And as a CEO, you stand in front of the company and announce, like, today we are doing a reduction in force. And will those people who are getting reduced have already heard that? Nope. And everyone, and here's why if it's, you know, the market's changed or we need to reduce costs or we built something, like giving a couple of reasons why we're going through it, but very

simple. And then kind of walking through, here's what we're all going to experience today. So either everyone's going to be met with or those impacted are going to have a meeting with their managers. So you're actually giving people a heads up. Yep. I didn't know that. I thought it was the other way around always.

So a lot of times what will happen is people will come to me and say, not comfortable standing in front of the company and saying that. And I'll say, okay, but just realize, as soon as you have that first, conversation with someone that they're being laid off, it will spread like wildfire. Everyone will like start guessing and you don't get to control the message. The very high level like we're doing this today and this is why. Then you dismiss everyone, you let everyone go back. No one's going to do anything during the day.

You have the conversations. You have managers sit down and talk to employees and tell them that they're being impacted. Does an HR person have to be staffing, legal, anything like that? If you think there's something that could go sideways, you can. You can pull HR into it, but your manager should be able to handle it. Okay. And then from there, I typically recommend bringing the company back together for like 10 minutes at the end of at the same notifications and saying, you know, it's been a hard day. We appreciate everything that everyone has done here.

You know, we're sad to see people leave. And it's typically around noon and let people go. You can either try and bring your workforce who is remaining back for at 3 o'clock or 4 o'clock or, you know, in the late afternoon just to do a quick. hey, this is what we're going to do the rest of the week, or have the next morning, and this is where you have to have tight communication, your PowerPoint, your everything's ready to go on. Here's how we move forward as a company. And this goes to Alex's point about sharing with the remaining employees in order to maintain morale that there is a plan to still win. And that our plan is so solid, we can share it with you today because the RIF actually helped us get to this plan.

So if we didn't have a plan, we couldn't have done the RIF. right? So here's our go forward plan. Yeah, we did it a little bit differently, but I haven't had as much experience. I will say that you have different currencies as a company, and obviously your most valuable currency is kind of the mission, and that is what it is. Like you can't, I mean, if you change the mission, that's often very, very challenging. It's the mission, and it's the personalities of kind of everybody involved. There's compensation, which is equity and cash. The value of the U.S. dollar isn't going to change, but your equity can change a lot.

The last is just responsibility. And what we did at the end, we did a couple things, and this is probably very non-traditional, but, you know, thing number one is actually we split the company in two. We had a different product within the company that we just thought was very, very high beta, and there was a lot of controversy around this. I think most people thought that we were idiots for doing this. Because imagine that your financials are not doing well. What's the first thing that goes in the chopping block?

It's the thing that could work in the future, but it's not anything about near-term revenue. and yet these are the things that you need to invest in for the future. So actually, we spun this out into a new effective Series A-backed company. And we had 25 people that wanted to, like, they missed the experience of working at an early-stage startup. They went off with the little ship. I mean, it wasn't a riff. It was like this was a funded company. And again, you can't always do this, but this was a fully formed product.

The main company, Trial Pay, was a lot more profitable at this point in time because we had all these expenses taken off our books. If you didn't get selected for that small boat, then you'd be you, you'd be selected for that small boat, than you were left in like the dying colossus. So what we did was we actually gave people a lot more responsibility. I mean, that was a huge morale booster. You're more vested in the future. You feel like you have control and ownership. Yeah, and we try to give them more equity as well.

But the problem is that like if you say, okay, well, this company is going to be worth a end state of zero. I mean, it wasn't. But like if you say that or people believe that and you say, hey, guess what we're giving you a lot more equity, it's very hard to make that valuable for people. But like this was something that we did where we had the group of people that really wanted these small stage experience again, and they were probably going to leave us for that reason. And we had a really cool product that they were very, very excited about.

Trial pay, I mean, I think the only currency that we really had left, because we couldn't pay people to stay for the very reasons that we talked about with just opics and whatnot, but we could give people a lot more responsibility. And I think that really worked. I think the end thing, just to, like, doing stuff like that, and if you've read Ben's book or if you've read some of Ben's blogs, or if you've heard our compensation thing, I was laid off and the second layoff. Oh, right. Yeah, you guys talked about it on the HR podcast. And so, like, the, if you do it right, the loyalty doesn't go away and you can continue, like, keeping, you know, people that are important. And, you know, I was the second, second layoff we did. I was reduced

and hired back within a year. But it was, it made sense to your point about the person that was really, they kept you up all night. So one last question then. How do you ensure that you get back the employees that you want back when you can get to a state where you can bring that person back for whatever reason. And how do you handle the one, the disgruntled employee that is always like saying crap about the company after they leave? I mean, I know there's stuff like non-disparagement. I think the more focus and the more you pay attention to the angry employee, the more what they have to say matters. People leave. People get angry. Changing jobs is what one top three of the most stressful things that you go through in your life. What are the other two in marriage and

Married. Babies. I think getting married. There's like there's three things. Death is one of them. But it's, it's one of those things that, so it's super, super stressful. And then when it's not controlled by you, I mean, there's people who are going to have anger. And, you know, my recommendation is usually to let it, just let the person simmer out unless there's like legal things you can do if they push it to the envelope.

But the more attention you give it, a lot of times, the more fuel you put on the fire. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it's funny. I won't say who. Now that trial pay got acquired by visa, I'll look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, and they'll say like they were, and this might have been a disgruntled person, and they'll say trial pay, and they change it to now like saying acquired by visa. So, I mean, the best medicine is really just to like, really, how do you make this company successful again? Because these feelings are often very transient. I mean, yes, if it gets to the point where you need a restraining order, like that's a different problem.

But if it's the normal course of action, which is, my view is that it's understandable. Like I viewed this as a colossal failure by me. And if somebody was mad at me, it's like, yeah, they should be mad at me. And I don't hold that against them. Now, if they're still mad at me like five years later, like that's a little odd. They might need to get some therapy. But, you know, I take it as a good sign that many years later, like I see all these LinkedIn profiles get updated where it's like they have some pride around where they worked.

I think it's this is a part of, you know, I have this conversation. There's a whole bunch of different compensation things going on right now. There's a whole bunch of different, you know, things going on on on how people. people manage their employee base. And I always say to folks, it's not always going to be smooth sailing. Like you will come across your hiccups in the way in which you handle yourself as a founder and a leader and what you expect of your leadership team. How you do that determines how you will actually end as a company.

I think that applies to life too because it's like how a person behaves in their karma. It's karma, but it's also how a person behaves in their worst moments reveal so much about their character. And it is, this is going to sound cheesy. I get to sound cheesy. My heart breaks every time I have to help a CEO founder reduce their company because it is, it's not something they ever dreamed they were going to have to do. And they hired people and they know people came to work for them and they trusted them. Being a founder and being a CEO is a tough job. It is definitely hard.

Well, thank you, Shannon and Alex, for sharing your experience. And that's another episode of the A6NC podcast.