Yesterday, Twitter laid off about 8 percent of its employees or roughly 1 in 12 people. Most entrepreneurs dread a moment like that more than anything else. It takes the pain of firing an individual employee and massively amplifies it. And yet it is often unavoidable on the path to building a company and sustaining it for the long term. Some of the criticism of Twitter’s layoffs took the form of arguing that Twitter shouldn’t have hired those employees in the first place. That criticism amoun...

Yesterday, Twitter laid off about 8 percent of its employees or roughly 1 in 12 people. Most entrepreneurs dread a moment like that more than anything else. It takes the pain of firing an individual employee and massively amplifies it. And yet it is often unavoidable on the path to building a company and sustaining it for the long term. Some of the criticism of Twitter’s layoffs took the form of arguing that Twitter shouldn’t have hired those employees in the first place. That criticism amoun...