via The Seattle Times, Mercent is laying off 6 of its 50 employees. As the article states, this is a ‘prudent’ cut in staff.
If you’re not a start up person in Silicon Valley, you might have missed the hooplah over Sequoia’s recent meeting with its portfolio companies. You can ge the recap (including the deck) here.
If you’re like me and are more than slightly pessimistic and believe that we’re in for a long financial winter (extending throughout all of 2009), then this slide is very important to pay attention to:
The lesson – cut costs now and horde cash so you don’t hit the death spiral. This would explain many of the layoffs in the Valley.
In other words, the difficult move by Eric Best can be viewed as a positive action. It’s a smart move to ensure it’s business as usual and that Mercent will ‘stay warm’ in this harsh economic climate.
There are other reasons for layoffs, but let’s just leave it at that for now…
As employees are shown the door, an employer like Mercent is wise to hang onto their e-mail records. –Ben http://legal-beagle.typepad.com/wrights_legal_beagle/2008/10/retain-e-mail-of-former-employees.html