In the early months of 2021, Anjuna Security was a company in overdrive. Bolstered by venture capital and a rising sense of invincibility, the cybersecurity startup was scaling rapidly, drawing in fresh faces week after week. Teams were assembled at a fast clip—sales, customer support, operations—all staffed with the confident expectation that the market’s appetite for their product was inexhaustible.
But markets do not read business plans. As the year unraveled, so too did the easy optimism. Big enterprise deals, once within arm’s reach, began slipping away. Across the tech sector, a mood of caution replaced exuberance. Like many of their peers, Anjuna had geared up for endless growth—hiring ahead of the curve, spending boldly, running light on reserves.
The inevitable reckoning arrived in the form of layoffs. First a wave, then—painfully—a second months later. By the end of it, the company’s headcount had been sliced, ambitions reined in, and the leadership team left with a cruel question: How to go forward, and keep those who remained hopeful?
Ayal Yogev, Anjuna’s co-founder and CEO, recently shared a candid account of this period with Isabelle Johannessen during an episode of TechCrunch’s Build Mode. For Yogev, the company’s survival hinged less on spreadsheets and more on something intangible—culture. “For us, the idea is simple,” Yogev reflected. “Care. We care about our people. We care about customers. We try to live that word out, day to day.”
It wasn’t just an empty mantra. During those difficult transitions, Anjuna leaned heavily on openness. Every move, every cutback, was explained with an honesty sometimes lacking in the business world. Staff were never left guessing. Those let go weren’t simply shown the door with a standard severance. The company’s leadership worked their networks to help former colleagues land on their feet, from job introductions to health benefits that didn’t vanish overnight.
What Anjuna avoided mattered just as much: no drawn-out silences from leadership, no clinical, corporate farewells, no cruel waiting games. The approach was swift, direct, and—crucially—sincere.
Yet the scars were real. A second round of layoffs battered morale. Trust, once bruised, proved harder to restore. But the deliberate way Anjuna had built its internal ethos—the daily routines of transparency and mutual respect—paid off. Instead of falling into the all-too-familiar cycle of finger-pointing, the team pressed forward with a collective curiosity: What did we miss? How do we avoid repeating this?
Yogev’s philosophy was clear-eyed about the dangers of scapegoating. “When companies go looking for villains, all that does is make people afraid to take risks,” he noted. “It breeds caution and blame, and that’s poison to innovation.”
Now, things feel different within Anjuna’s walls. Hiring is cautious, intentional. Growth tracks with real, validated demand rather than wishful estimates. The team leans on smarter tools—AI among them—to boost productivity instead of swelling the payroll in anticipation. The mood is sober, but shot through with a sort of earned resilience.
Elsewhere, TechCrunch’s Build Mode continues to dig into stories like Anjuna’s—founders facing adversity, learning out loud, remaking their companies in a changed world. Isabelle Johannessen, who leads TechCrunch’s iconic Startup Battlefield, brings her own rigor and stage-savvy to every episode, drawing out the insights behind both the success stories and the scars.
And behind the scenes, podcast producer Maggie Nye and her team work to bring these conversations to life. Each episode is crafted to strip away jargon and surface the emotional core of founders’ journeys.
For startups, tales like Anjuna’s carry a hard lesson: Culture is not a slide in a deck, but the lived fabric of decisions made under pressure. Leadership is measured not in boom times, but when the tide turns and people are watching, wondering—what happens now? If Anjuna’s experience is any proof, resilience is built not in the hiring frenzy, but in the honesty of the aftermath.
The next chapters for these companies are still unwritten, but the way forward is a little clearer—less about chasing hype, more about building something that lasts.
