Where to begin...
First, what others have said about laying off half the team right before Christmas—with only one month of severance—is true. In many cases, it was worse than that. Several people had recently been assured by founding leaders that they would have jobs through the holidays.
Second, the founding team at Tidelift consistently withheld information from non-founding leaders—such as engineering, product, and customer success leaders—let alone individual contributors. And when I say "information," I’m referring to basic stuff that would normally be shared at a tech startup. For example:
What is our revenue, and what are our profits or current burn rate?
Are we on track with company goals? If not, how are we adapting?
How many months of runway do we have?
What is the business strategy for growth?
How is each department performing relative to its goals, and what are we learning from both our successes and failures?
Is anyone being held accountable for the near-total lack of sales over the past two years?
The list goes on.
Unfortunately, during the final six months of the business, the founders went completely dark—flatly refusing to speak at weekly all-hands meetings about the state of the company. You can imagine how this soured the culture and progressively destroyed what little trust remained. Near the end, most ICs across departments were either quietly quitting or begging their leaders for guidance and transparency. Sadly, the founding team refused to offer either.
Third, the founders refused to pivot or take accountability for their mistakes. Over the final two years of the company’s existence, they made three significant strategic blunders—despite strong pushback from ICs. One such blunder was spending roughly nine months on go-to-market and development work based on the mere possibility of favorable government regulation. Several ICs with extensive government experience confidently warned that this regulation was unlikely to materialize and advised leadership to wait before investing millions of dollars in a "what if" scenario. The founders ignored their employees, and as expected, the regulation never passed—resulting in millions wasted. No accountability was taken or communicated.
In the end, it was clear to everyone at Tidelift that the founders were going to prioritize their relationships with investors over their employees. I don’t know a single IC who would want to work with any of them again.