In 2021, Anjuna Security was growing fast, hiring aggressively, and chasing a market that seemed limitless. By the end of that year, the venture-backed cybersecurity company had scaled to around 75 employees, building out sales, customer success, and support teams in anticipation of continued hypergrowth.

Then 2022 hit.

As the market turned, enterprise clients became harder to land. Like many startups building at that time, Anjuna was overextended and underfunded. So the company was forced to make a difficult decision and laid off a portion of its staff, then conducted another round of layoffs months later. 

Cutting costs was only part of the challenge. The harder question was how to rebound and keep the remaining team members motivated. 

Ayal Yogev, the CEO and co-founder of Anjuna, joined Isabelle Johannessen on TechCrunch’s Build Mode to discuss how the company survived the volatile market by acting quickly, making cuts with compassion, and learning from early missteps.

One of the reasons Anjuna was able to endure two rounds of layoffs was that the company had already put in 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’s 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, that meant transparency and communicating clearly about what was happening and why. Externally, it meant supporting departing employees beyond severance, from sharing job opportunities through investor networks to ensuring continued access to benefits like healthcare.

Crucially, the company avoided common pitfalls that erode trust during layoffs like 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 was already established shaped how the remaining team responded. Rather than focusing on blame, the emphasis was on learning: what went wrong, and how to avoid repeating it.

“There’s kind of two things people do, like the kind of worst companies are looking for somebody to blame and that always ends up creating a culture of people are just trying to not make mistakes,” Yogev said. “Just creates a culture of blaming, which is just completely counterproductive, right?”

Today, Anjuna is rebuilding with a different approach. Hiring is more deliberate. Sales growth is tied closely to actual demand. And new tools, including AI, are helping the team operate more efficiently without overexpanding.

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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Build Mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.