I would think Tailwind could keep 3 engineers around if they are getting sponsorship of over $1m/yr.

I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... to see what the full picture was.

Remaining:

- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)

- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)

- Steve (owner/design lead)

- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)

- Robin (engineer)

There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.

No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.

Not necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last. There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that makes sense.

[0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

Obviously, yes. Even in the SV area. We all know engineers' capabilities triple or more if they work from there. /S