THE INDIAN start-up fraternity recently went through a rough patch. In early November, TinyOwl found itself in a huge crisis when four of its co-founders were apparently held hostage in its offices in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai by laid-off employees. One of the founders, Gaurav Choudhary, who had gone to the Pune office to break the news of shutting shop in all the four cities, was even held hostage for over 36 hours. In September, the Mumbai-based food delivery start-up had initiated its first round of lay-offs that resulted in about 200 employees being shown the door.
A month later, while Helpchat (a chat-based personal assistant app) let go of over 150 employees, global restaurant search and discovery service company Zomato cut 10% of its global workforce of 3,000 employees close on the heels of trying to fill 1,200 open positions at the beginning of summer. Later, Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato, shot off an angry email to his sales staff about the company missing its sales targets, which got leaked to the media and made headlines. There were also some reports that Mumbai-based real estate search portal Housing.comhad shown the door to 600 employees a couple of months ago to trim costs.