“Letting people go” is taking on the risk of all of those people being let go losing the ability to rent or pay their mortgages. That seems like more than an inconvenience to me if you take one of the responsibilities of being an employer at all seriously.

No employee should join a startup with the expectation that the company will be around forever.

Compare startups to restaurants- their failure rate is absolutely massive. Working for a new company is simply always a risk for everyone involved, there's no getting around that.

If you are working a tech job and know how to program computers and have no savings slash the loss of a job costs you your house, you have deep and fundamental problems far beyond the loss of one job and it isn’t your former employer’s fault that your life is mismanaged.

far easier for me to layoff people at megacorp then when your the founder

at megacorp, you shrug and look them in the eye and they know you can’t do much

your in the same boat

as a founder every layoff is YOUR failure