The Layoff That Saved Tive: Making Hard Decisions at 3 Months of Runway

The Layoff That Saved Tive: Making Hard Decisions at 3 Months of Runway

Three months of cash. A product customers liked but wouldn’t adopt at scale. A team that believed in the vision but couldn’t pay their own bills much longer. Krenar Komoni, Founder and CEO of Tive, faced the math every struggling founder dreads: the burn rate was winning.

The decision wasn’t whether to make cuts. It was how deep to cut. Krenar chose brutal: half the company had to go.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Krenar shared the tactical and emotional reality of that 2018 layoff—the decision that bought Tive six months of runway and, more importantly, forced the clarity that led to product-market fit. Today, Tive has raised $80 million and shipped over 1.5 million trackers. But none of it would exist without that painful moment when survival required cutting the team in half.

When Good Products Meet Bad Business Models

Tive’s tracker was technically impressive. Over a year of battery life, real-time GPS and temperature monitoring, cellular connectivity—customers like Nokia were using it. On paper, the product worked. In reality, the business was dying.

The problem wasn’t the hardware. It was the $250 price point and the requirement that customers return the devices. “The challenge was they couldn’t use it a lot because they had to figure out how to, they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be one of my first customers was Nokia, but then they would have to return these trackers back,” Krenar explains.

Every successful shipment created a reverse logistics problem. Customers who managed complex supply chains couldn’t handle the operational overhead of returning trackers. Adoption stalled. Revenue flatlined. The bank account drained toward zero.

By late 2018, Krenar was staring at three months of runway with no clear path to profitability.

The Math of Survival

Founders love to talk about pivots and experimentation. Few talk about the brutal arithmetic that forces those pivots. Krenar needed to extend three months of runway to at least nine—enough time to learn what customers actually needed and rebuild the product around that insight.

The only variable he could control fast enough was headcount. “In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that,” Krenar says, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’s made peace with a decision that still haunts them.

Half the team. Not a 10% trim or a careful restructuring. Half. The calculation was simple: nine months gave Tive a realistic shot at finding product-market fit. Anything less meant slow death with a bigger team watching it happen.

What Six Months Actually Buys You

Those six months of extended runway weren’t valuable because they delayed the inevitable. They were valuable because they forced a different operating mode. With half the team gone and the clock ticking louder, Krenar couldn’t afford theories about what customers wanted. He needed data.

He and a small team of college graduates became an outbound machine. They started cold calling and cold emailing 150 to 200 potential customers every single week. “Email, cold call, email, cold call, change messaging, change the subject line, change how we write things and just try and try,” Krenar recalls.

The volume mattered. At that scale of outreach, patterns emerge fast. Proof-of-value engagements jumped from one per month to two or three per week. More importantly, the feedback converged on a single insight: the return requirement was killing adoption.

“Throughout that process, we learned a lot about this issue and we learned that we got to figure out how to make more cost effective trackers that could be used once and if the customer doesn’t return them, it’s okay,” Krenar explains. That learning only happened because the layoff bought time for hundreds of customer conversations.

The Hidden Benefit of Resource Constraints

Counterintuitively, having fewer resources forced better decisions. With a full team and healthy runway, Tive might have spent months perfecting the reusable tracker or building features to make returns easier. The layoff eliminated those options.

Instead, Krenar had to solve the fundamental business model problem: how do you make a tracker cheap enough to be disposable while maintaining first-sale profitability? “I couldn’t afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like over the first sale,” he notes.

That constraint drove him and his VP of technology to fly to China and visit eight different manufacturing sites. They needed partners who could build cost-effective hardware while remaining flexible to a startup’s evolving needs. “We figured out who can make cost effective trackers for us, but most importantly, who can listen to us, because we have the ideas, we have the way on how we want to build this, how we want to design it,” Krenar explains.

A well-funded team might have outsourced that search or hired consultants. A team fighting for survival gets on planes and visits factories themselves.

What Layoffs Actually Teach You

The hardest part of layoffs isn’t the logistics—it’s the emotional weight of telling people who believed in your vision that you can’t afford them anymore. Krenar doesn’t dwell on those conversations in the interview, but the brevity with which he mentions the decision suggests the kind of compartmentalization founders develop when survival demands it.

What he does emphasize is what came after: aggressive action. The layoff created clarity. Either the remaining team would find product-market fit in nine months, or Tive would shut down. That binary outcome eliminated middle-ground thinking.

The cold calling wasn’t just lead generation—it was systematic customer development at scale. The China trips weren’t just manufacturing partnerships—they were betting the company on a completely new product economics model. Everything became existential, which paradoxically made decisions easier.

From Disposable Trackers to Product-Market Fit

By January 2020, Tive released what Krenar calls “the world’s first single use 5G ready tracker.” The timing was remarkable—just months before COVID-19 would thrust supply chain visibility into every kitchen table conversation. But the real breakthrough had nothing to do with timing.

“I would say we hit product market fit with that because customers were using these single use trackers that go on shipments, but they were 2G, like GSM. And 2G was phasing out,” Krenar explains. The disposable model solved the reverse logistics problem. The 5G-ready technology solved the connectivity problem. Together, they created a product customers could actually adopt at scale.

None of it would have happened without those six months bought by cutting half the team.

The Principle Behind the Tactic

The lesson here isn’t “do layoffs” or “cut headcount aggressively.” The lesson is about what resource constraints force you to learn. With ample runway, founders can afford to be theoretically right. With three months of cash, you need to be practically right—and fast.

The layoff didn’t save Tive by reducing burn rate, though that mattered. It saved Tive by creating the conditions for rapid learning. Fewer people meant faster decision-making. Tighter timelines meant more customer conversations. Existential pressure meant no time for polite theories about what might work.

Today, Tive has 205 employees and is preparing for an IPO. The company that Krenar built from those desperate nine months looks nothing like the one he had to dismantle. But the learning from that period—the customer insights, the manufacturing relationships, the disposable business model—became the foundation for everything that followed.

Sometimes the decision that feels like failure is actually the decision that makes success possible. You just can’t see it until you’re on the other side.