What can founders learn from layoffs and recovery at Anjuna?

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 grown to about 75 employees, building sales, customer success, and support teams in anticipation of continued hypergrowth.

Then hit 2022.

As the market has transformed, it has become more difficult to get corporate clients. Like many startups created at the time, Anjuna was underfunded and underfunded. So the company was forced to make a difficult decision and laid off part of its employees, then conducted another round of layoffs months later.

Cutting costs was only part of the challenge. The tougher question was how to bounce back and keep the remaining team members motivated.

Eyal Yogev, CEO and co-founder of Anjuna, joined Isabelle Johannessen on TechCrunch’s Build Mode to discuss how the company survives a volatile market by acting quickly, making cuts with empathy, and learning from early mistakes.

One of the reasons Anjuna has been able to withstand two rounds of layoffs is that the company has already taken the time to build a strong internal culture, grounded in a simple idea. “We only have 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 clearly communicating what was happening and why. Externally, this meant supporting departing employees after their tenure, from sharing job opportunities through investor networks to ensuring continued access to benefits such as health care.

Most importantly, the company avoided common pitfalls that erode trust during layoffs, such as prolonged uncertainty, impersonal processes, or leadership silence. Instead, decisions were made quickly, and conversations were handled straightforwardly.

However, the effect was real. The second round of layoffs made rebuilding trust more difficult. But the culture that emerged did shape how the remaining team responded. Instead of focusing on blame, the focus was on learning: what went wrong, and how to avoid repeating it.

“There are two things people do, like the worst companies look for someone to blame, and it always ends up creating a culture that people are just trying not to make mistakes,” Yogev said. “It creates a culture of blame, which is completely counterproductive, isn’t it?”

Today, Anjuna is rebuilding in a different way. Recruitment is more intentional. Sales growth is closely related to actual demand. New tools, including artificial intelligence, help the team work more efficiently without over-extending.

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Isabel Johansson is our host. Build mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development is led by Morgan Little. And special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.