I think he's talking in absolute terms versus relative terms that founders are used to thinking in.
Imagine that you have $3 million in runway, but you are burning $500K a month. That only gives you 6 months of runway.
It takes perspective to zoom out to realise - "Hey, I actually have $3 million in the bank. That's a lot of money. If I can somehow reduce costs to $150K a month, I actually have 20 months of runway to figure things out."
Unfortunately, this means "cutting more than needed".
The 'right thing' in this case means something like 'face reality clearly, instead of clinging to fantasy because things are too painful or scary'. If you read to the end where he says "People are counting on you to do the right thing", he's telling founders not to shy away from difficult decisions because they're afraid of what outsiders might say. The point is that if you know deep down what needs doing, you're not helping anyone by avoiding it.
My assumption is that "plenty of cash" is conditional on aggressive layoffs. He says "high burn" early on so I was assuming a scenario of "everyone loses their jobs within 6 months" vs "30% keep their jobs."
A startup, by definition, is a group of people searching for a viable business model. It does not look like this in that hard moment where everyone looks at you and faults you for failing, but in the end surviving with a third of employees and potentially helping to rebuild the economy two years later is the ethically and economically preferable alternative imho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi-Z5uCe7xs
>[Triumph is a plaintiff,] a rubber dog, black and brown in color, that wears a gold bow tie, often smokes a cigar, and interacts with animals and with humans through rude and often vulgar comments, through physical actions and/or attacks.
>[The pets.com sock puppet] is an advocate of pets, the voice of pets, and often interacts and communicates directly with other animals or with humans in order to convey to pet owners how pets feel about various pet related issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgtn7iAXSgc
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-04-mn-26524...
>“Maybe they see a profit potential in the sock puppet, because they sure aren’t going to make much money overnight shipping dog food to America,” says Bob Garfield, media critic for the industry trade publication Advertising Age.
> People are counting on you to do the right thing.
Only because he says this after talking about layoffs as a purely business decision. I have no moral qualms with doing layoffs, and as others discussed it might be better to do one for the moral of the employees than to be stuck with multiple rounds of layoffs. But he talks about having plenty of cash, then cutting more than needed (which is people's livelihood)... then uses the same livelihood as motivation. Am I being overly cynical?