It Took Four Layoffs to Ask the Right Question

I got laid off four times in five years.

And for a long time the question that haunted me was: why me? Why does this keep happening? Am I choosing wrong? Am I doing something wrong?

It took all four to realize I was asking the wrong question.

The first one lasted one day

September 2020. I'd just left Sonae after eight years — five as a controller building automations, three in product where I finally found my thing. I was ready.

An AI recruitment company in London picked me out of 400 candidates for a single product role. My first remote tech job. I set up my home office in August, took vacation, mentally prepared. That office is still my office today.

Day one was onboarding. Met the team. Got excited about the product. Went to bed buzzing.

Day two I got a call from the Head of Product. The company was being acquired by a US competitor. They were keeping only the people needed for the tech transition. I'd been there for one day — they had no use for me.

No hard feelings. Makes total business sense. But try explaining that to your gut when you're sitting in your brand new home office with nowhere to go.

The one that made me sick

Next was a palm oil trading company that wanted a product manager for their internal tech projects. The founders had a tech podcast. They talked about innovation. I thought I'd found my people.

Two days in they wanted me running the ops team that collected waste oil from restaurants. Completely out of scope. And the schedule — rigid, early, non-negotiable. Every morning the thought of going in made me physically sick. I'm not being dramatic. Actual vomiting.

They let me go after a week because I was late almost every day. Fair enough. My body was rejecting the place before my mind caught up.

The ZIRP twins

Then came Knok and Jscrambler. Two startups, both Series A, both during the tail end of the zero-interest-rate era.

At Knok I stayed almost two years. Built things I was proud of. Saw real impact. But the market shifted, VCs tightened, and the company needed to extend its runway. Newer hires got cut. I was newer.

Four months later I joined Jscrambler. Same story, different logo. Six months in, same macro forces, same outcome. Investors demanded headcount reduction before they'd commit to the next round. I was on the chopping block again.

Both times I was delivering. Both times it didn't matter.

The pattern

Here's what I see when I line up all four:

1. Acquisition killed the role — nothing I could have done
2. Cultural mismatch — my body knew before my brain did
3. Macro economics — VCs pulled back, headcount got cut
4. Same macro economics — different company, identical outcome

Not one of these was about my performance. Not one would have been prevented by working harder, staying later, or caring more.

And that's the thing that breaks you if you let it — or sets you free if you don't.

The question that changed everything

After the fourth layoff, a new question replaced the old one.

The old question was: why me?

The new one: why am I giving 100% to build someone else's thing when the structural risk is the same whether I give 60% or 120%?

My effort didn't cause the layoffs. More effort wouldn't have prevented them. The outcome was always controlled by forces I had zero influence over — acquisitions, culture I didn't set, interest rates I didn't move.

So I stopped asking why me and started asking why not me — as in, why not build for myself?

What I'm doing now

I build things. My own things. Small tools, products, systems. Some will work, most won't. But the risk is mine now. The upside is mine. And when something doesn't work out, at least I know exactly why.

I still get recruiter messages. I never say no — I show up, I prepare, I do my best. But there's a moment in every interview where they ask me what I'm working on now. And my whole body changes. I lean forward. My eyes light up. I talk faster. I can feel the energy shift in the room.

Then we go back to discussing the role and the energy drops back to normal. They can feel it too. The contrast says everything I can't say politely: the thing I'm building for myself excites me more than anything you could offer me.

Those four layoffs weren't failures. They were the curriculum. Each one taught me that the safest-looking path — stable job, good company, series A funding — was never actually safe. The safety was an illusion controlled by someone else's spreadsheet.

The only real safety is building something where you control the variables. Or at least, where you choose which variables you can't control.