Letting People Go: Team Management and the Founder's Reality

Nobody thanks you for letting someone go. That is the most honest sentence I know about leadership.

I have built 9 companies, sold 3, led 300 people as CCO. I have built teams up and scaled teams down. When I had sleepless nights, it was almost never about numbers. It was about people. About the relationship with those I had to part with. This is not a glossy piece. It is a receipt, from founder to founder.

What you take away:

• How I decide who stays and who goes, without sorting an Excel by salary.
• Why I talk to the people who stay first.
• How I run the conversation, fast and with respect.
• How I personally cope when the world is against me.

My thesis: building teams also means changing teams

When you build a team, you are not building a fixed object. You build something that changes with every phase. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Both belong to it. Anyone who only romanticises the growth side has never survived a recession.

🧨 Why it comes to this in the first place

For me the reason was almost always the same: I had to cut costs. The growth story did not hold. A financing round fell through. Or I wanted to survive longer on the cash I had until fresh money came in. Then you need a hard cost cut.

And yes, that is my mistake. I made the plans. I got the company there. That belongs to the honesty.

🛠️ How I do it, and how I do not

Wrong would be: put everyone in an Excel, sort by salary, cut from the top. Just as wrong: last in, first out. Neither has anything to do with impact.

Here is how I do it:

• Top-down from the budget. I look at where costs have to land. Revenue is relatively fixed.
• Target organisation first. Who is essential for the next phase, who holds the knowledge.
• Once, not in tranches. Letting a few go month after month poisons the mood. After the second or third round everyone expects it, and the good people start looking elsewhere.

The most important step: one day before the official announcement I sit down 1:1 with the people who stay. I explain why I am counting on them and what their role looks like. Some get promoted, some get more responsibility. Because it is usually the good people who find a new job the fastest. I do not want to lose them to uncertainty.

The day after, I inform the people I am parting with. The conversation is short. Hello, no long small talk. I frame it: this is about parting ways, the decision is made. It is not a negotiation. The centre is not the why, it is the what-now: laptop, garden leave, next steps. Later, when it is less emotional, I talk through the reasons and offer intros.

🤖 Remote does not make it easier

I have worked with remote teams for over 20 years, mostly developers. You cannot have someone sign at the table. When possible I visit the team and do it in person. Otherwise a team lead on site handles it, or I do a video call. Developers usually have two or three job offers via LinkedIn in their pocket. The worry is not that they will not find work. The worry is that I do it badly and lose the good people who stay. Developers tend to read situations too negatively. So: maximum transparency, pick everyone back up.

For offboarding I think ahead. Live data, customer contact, access rights. At startups this is often messy. I have never seen anything truly bad happen. But with GDPR I will not take the risk.

The strongest argument: the world is small

You meet these people again. In the startup and SaaS world, guaranteed. So I do it in a way that lets me look at myself in the mirror. Even the ones who never come back talk to others. I want the sentence to be: "It was not fun, but they did it cleanly." That is recruiter marketing too.

There is the famous example of the big company that laid off masses of people and then rehired the same ones. That only shows chaotic planning. I always tried to hire only what was needed and to part ways only when it was truly certain. Almost everyone I let go had a new job within a short time, often a better one.

🎢 Highs, lows, warnings

✅ What works: a clear plan, executed once, plus 1:1s with the people who stay. That pulls the energy back into a startup groove.

❌ What does not work: ad-hoc decisions, tranches, promises you cannot keep. Say "nobody else has to go" and then let someone go, and you lose everyone's trust.

⚠️ Warning: self-hygiene is not a luxury. After hard days I went running or did high-intensity training. I set myself lighthouse projects, holidays with family, something to look forward to. With co-founders I carried the decision together and reflected honestly.

Back to the start: nobody thanks you. But a dissolved employment is not the end of the line, neither for the person nor for you. Building teams means changing teams. That is part of the job. If you are rebuilding a GTM or product department today, think in a Hyperlean team: a few pros plus AI agents that work around the clock. Three instead of thirty. Then you make these decisions less often, and when you do, they touch fewer people.