Welcome to the A6NC 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 Schiltz, 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 Rampel, 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 RIFs, 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.

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