What? If you're cutting, you're not doing it for excess fuck-you cash, it's clearly a runway planning scenario. Giving the example of a company that basically shut down while paying their employees to do nothing isn't helping make your point.

Your missing his point. He used this as an opportunity to increase loyalty, keep a trained functioning team together at decent wages which were able to outperform other companies who laided off, rehired months later at greater costs, no loyalty and starting from ground zero.

The pandemic had "paycheck protection program" or PPP and a second round of this called PPP2 also. This program payed out billions to employers to keep employees, rather than let them go on unemployment, which would have been less productive to the country and maybe even cost the government more in those $600 per week in unemployment, per person. I seriously doubt any startup could otherwise have kept their employees thanks to their 'war chest.' Normally startups don't have a war chest at all.

This startup had a 2 year runway after factoring in their office lease. Dropping the lease (since no one was coming in anyway) would have extended that. But you're right about PPP. They got PPP money a few months after the pandemic started.