1. Headline & intro
The era of carefree hypergrowth is over, but many founders are still operating with 2021 instincts. Anjuna Security’s rise, painful layoffs and subsequent recovery — described in a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Build Mode — is a useful X-ray of what happens when those instincts collide with reality. This is not just another layoff story; it’s a case study in how to correct course without destroying the company’s soul.
In this piece, we’ll look at what actually went wrong at Anjuna, what they did differently the second time around, and what concrete lessons early-stage and growth-stage founders should take away before the next market wobble hits.
2. The news in brief
According to TechCrunch’s coverage of the Build Mode podcast, Anjuna Security, a venture-backed cybersecurity startup, ramped up quickly in 2021. Expecting sustained hypergrowth, the company grew to roughly 75 people, expanding sales, customer success and support ahead of confirmed demand.
When enterprise spending tightened in 2022, that bet stopped working. Deals became harder to close, and Anjuna found itself with a cost base sized for a boom and a market behaving like a downturn. The company carried out one round of layoffs, then a second some months later, as it tried to align runway with slower growth.
CEO and co-founder Ayal Yogev told Build Mode that Anjuna leaned heavily on a culture centred on caring for employees and customers: being unusually transparent, acting quickly, and offering support beyond standard severance. The company has since shifted to more deliberate hiring, tying growth more tightly to actual revenue and leveraging AI tools to operate with a leaner team.
3. Why this matters
For founders, Anjuna’s story is a quiet warning: you don’t get infinite pivots before people stop trusting you.
The obvious lesson is about overhiring, but that’s almost too easy. The more interesting takeaway is how Anjuna handled the second layoff. The first cut is painful; the second one questions leadership competence and honesty. If you tell people “this is the last one” and it isn’t, your moral credit line with the team is close to maxed out.
Anjuna had one asset many companies lacked during the 2022–2023 layoff wave: a culture that was already lived, not laminated. Because “care” had been practiced in normal times — through direct communication and genuine support — it was credible in the crisis. That credibility bought the founders time and goodwill to fix earlier mistakes.
Who benefits from this kind of reset?
- The remaining team, if leadership actually learns and stops playing the headcount game.
- Customers, who get a more focused, sustainable company rather than a growth-at-all-costs experiment.
- Investors, who see a path to disciplined growth instead of a binary outcome.
Who loses? Anyone still clinging to the idea that values statements alone will rescue you when the spreadsheet stops adding up.
4. The bigger picture
Anjuna’s arc is part of a broader pattern. From late 2022 onward, we saw a multi-year correction: well-known tech companies from Stripe to Klarna, as well as hundreds of smaller startups, all discovered that hiring ahead of revenue only works when capital is essentially free and customers are buying on FOMO.
Three trends make Anjuna’s case feel emblematic:
From growth-at-all-costs to efficient-growth-or-die. Boards are now asking uncomfortable questions much earlier: What is the real payback period for this sales hire? What if enterprise budgets freeze again? Founders who can’t answer with a sober model, not a narrative, are in trouble.
Layoffs as a culture stress test. Almost every startup now claims to “care” about people. The test is what happens when the burn multiple is too high. Dragging out bad news, hiding behind email, or outsourcing the hard conversations to HR erodes trust far more than the job cuts themselves.
AI as a lever for lean teams. Anjuna’s renewed focus on using AI tools mirrors a wider shift: founders are rebuilding org charts with the assumption that a smaller, more senior team augmented by AI can do what a much larger team did in 2021. That won’t magically fix a broken business model, but it does change the calculus of when you truly need to hire.
Seen against this backdrop, Anjuna is less an outlier and more a reasonably well-handled example of a transition every ambitious startup is now forced to navigate.
5. The European / regional angle
For European founders, especially in more regulated labour markets like Germany, France or Spain, Anjuna’s experience raises a different set of questions.
In much of Europe, it is legally and culturally harder to fire people quickly. Works councils, collective agreements and mandatory notice periods make “we’ll just trim 30% if it gets rough” a fantasy. That should push European startups toward even more conservative hiring — but it often doesn’t. Many simply copy Silicon Valley headcount playbooks without the flexibility to unwind them.
The second European angle is trust. Users and employees here are already more sceptical of US-style “move fast and break things”. A security startup that mishandles layoffs risks not only losing talent, but also damaging credibility with enterprise clients that expect continuity and robust processes — especially under frameworks like NIS2 and GDPR, where security incidents carry regulatory consequences.
Finally, there’s competition. Europe has a growing confidential-computing and cybersecurity ecosystem, supported by programmes like Horizon Europe and national sovereign-cloud initiatives. Founders in this space can differentiate not just on tech, but on how they treat people during downturns. In a tight talent market for security engineers, the memory of how you handled the last crisis is a long-term recruiting asset or liability.
6. Looking ahead
A few predictions and signals to watch:
Layoffs will become rarer, but sharper. The 2022–2024 cull removed a lot of excess. The next cuts are likelier to be targeted — underperforming product lines, regions or layers of management — rather than across-the-board percentage trims.
“Compassionate layoffs” will be audited by reality. Many companies used empathetic language while behaving mechanically. Employees now compare notes on LinkedIn, in Slacks and private groups. Founders should assume that every process detail — timing, severance, communication — becomes part of the public employer brand.
AI will delay, but not eliminate, hard choices. Leaner, AI-augmented teams can stretch runway and reduce the pressure to bulk up headcount. But if the fundamental go-to-market is broken or the product doesn’t solve a painful problem, automation just makes the failure cheaper, not less likely.
Boards will demand pre-baked “if-then” plans. Expect investors to insist on contingency scenarios: what happens to burn if revenue stalls for three quarters, which roles get protected, what initiatives get cut. Anjuna’s two-step layoff path is a reminder that improvising under pressure usually leads to repeated wounds.
The founders who navigate the next downturn best will be those who treat culture, hiring and cost discipline as a single system — not three separate slides in a pitch deck.
7. The bottom line
Anjuna’s reset illustrates a hard truth: culture does not protect you from bad financial decisions, but it can determine whether you survive them. Founders who are still hiring like it’s 2021 are effectively betting their company on a macro environment they don’t control. The more rational bet is to grow into real demand, design humane worst-case scenarios in advance, and earn the trust you’ll need if those scenarios ever trigger. The question for every founder now is simple: if you had to cut tomorrow, would your team actually believe you today?
