It was a scary 48 hours for two of the employee of food ordering startup TinyOwl, who were held hostage at their Pune office by disgruntled employees over the layoff fiasco.
The whole drama unfolded when the employers visited the Pune site, one of the four cities where Tiny Owl is shutting down its operations, and the employees demanded to be paid immediately.
Following a fund crunch the company had given pink slips to 200 employees in September this year. A week before TinyOwl raised Rs. 50 crore from existing investors led by Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners which came with the understanding to restructure the company and bring down the burn rate. Hence as a part of this restructuring process it laid off another 112 employees.
In a press note Harshvardhan Mandad, Co-founder & CEO, TinyOwl, said,
“We have had a long day in resolving a critical situation in Pune wherein two of our employees had been made to stay back in office for over 48 hours. We have been able to resolve this and have immediately started working on considering the demands beyond the terms of employment, placed forward by other employees from other cities. We request you to please give us some time to first address our employees concerns. Post that we will be more than happy to answer any queries you may have.”
