“We have all seen the state of the market,” IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi wrote in a company-wide memo where the social app announced it would be dramatically cutting staff. Similar to dozens of startups over the past few weeks, IRL has just announced it’s laying off 25% of its team, or around 25 people, citing market dynamics. The cut comes around a year after the startup landed a $170 million SoftBank-led Series C and hit coveted unicorn status.
What’s different from recent layoffs, though, is the company’s tone.
“Courage is a decision, and we will choose courage,” Shafi wrote in the memo, obtained by TechCrunch. “Whatever we are facing today can’t be any worse than the uncertainty we met at the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic.”
Regardless of the state of the pandemic, though, layoffs force workers into an unexpected period of precariousness, augmented by the …
