In 2021, Anjuna Security was growing rapidly, hiring aggressively and chasing a market that seemed limitless. By the end of that year, the venture-backed cybersecurity company had scaled to about 75 employees, building sales, customer success and support teams in anticipation of continued overgrowth.
Then 2022 hit.
As the market turned, enterprise customers became harder to land. Like many startups at the time, Anjuna was overextended and underfunded. So the company was forced to make a difficult decision and laid off some of its staff, then conducted another round of layoffs months later.
Cutting costs was only part of the challenge. The hardest question was how to rebound and keep the rest of the team motivated.
Ayal Yogev, Anjuna’s CEO and co-founder, joined Isabelle Johannessen on TechCrunch’s Build Mode to discuss how the company survived the volatile market by acting quickly, making compassionate cuts and learning from early mistakes.
One of the reasons Anjuna was able to withstand two rounds of layoffs was that the company had already taken the time to build a strong internal culture anchored in a simple idea. “We have only one word when it comes to culture, and that is care,” Yogev said. “We care about our employees. We care about our customers.”
Rather than treating culture as a set of abstract values, the company focused on consistent behavior. Internally, this meant transparency and clear communication about what was happening and why. Externally, it meant supporting departing workers beyond layoffs, from sharing job opportunities through investor networks to ensuring continued access to benefits like health care.
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Mainly, the company avoided common pitfalls that erode trust during layoffs, such as prolonged uncertainty, impersonal processes or silence from leadership. Instead, decisions were made quickly and conversations were handled directly.
Even so, the impact was real. A second round of layoffs made rebuilding trust more difficult. But the culture that had already been established shaped how the rest of the team responded. Instead of focusing on guilt, the emphasis was on learning: what went wrong and how to avoid it happening again.
“There are two things that people do, like the worst companies kind of look for someone to blame, and that always ends up creating a culture of people just trying not to make mistakes,” Yogev said. “It just creates a culture of blame, which is just completely counterproductive, right?”
Today, Anjuna is rebuilding with a different approach. Recruitment is more deliberate. Sales growth is closely related to actual demand. And new tools, including artificial intelligence, help the team work more efficiently without overstretching.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Construction mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Head of Audience Development is Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
