A note I shared with the Tome team yesterday

All,

Over the past few months, Tome has transitioned from a consumer-focused slides company to building tools that help businesses find and reach new customers. To plan for our new future and set ourselves up for a durable growth path, we have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by 12 people. If this has affected you, you have already been contacted.

We made this decision by looking at our progress over the past few months and estimating how long we’ll need to build with our customers before scaling. We finished our MVP product at the end of September and have closed more than a dozen design partnerships since then. We’re helping these companies — from enterprises with over 2000 people to startups with 2 people — automate a set of tasks that are critical to their sales motion, including:

1. Prioritizing which accounts to go after
2. Researching their financials, initiatives, and key decision makers
3. Crafting highly personalized emails that actually work with their audience
4. Preparing for effective discovery meetings

Because this is a completely new direction for us, we tried to work backwards from getting as much time as possible to build and listen to feedback. Although this is right decision for our company in the long-term, it doesn’t change the impact this has on the individuals affected. This was a hard decision that I did not make lightly and I take full responsibility for it.

With the changes we’ve made in the past few weeks, including divesting from our slides product, we’re now in a strong position to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. We have focus, enough time, a large capital reserve for a start up, and the ability to invest in new areas (eg. ML) that we’re confident will drive growth.

Looking forward, I’ve never been more optimistic about where Tome is headed. We’re solving important problems for a wide range of businesses (from partnerships with two person start ups to enterprises with thousands of people), building differentiated frontier technology, and have started to crack a reproducible go to market motion. We’ve made serious progress on going 0 to 1 with the assistant in the past few months and I have every reason to believe we’ll get through this period flourishing.

To the folks that are leaving, thank you for everything you’ve done for our company. We’ll do everything we can to support you through this transition. We’ll be offering the following:

• Severance pay and compensation: You’ll receive a minimum of 8 weeks of pay, with an additional week for every full year at Tome, inclusive of any contractual pay.
• Continued health benefits: You’ll receive 3 months of healthcare to get through the rest of 2024.
• Immigration support: If you have a visa, we’ll your structure your severance to provide additional time to find your next opportunity. We’ll also make our immigration counsel available to you
• Technical support: Your Tome laptop and accessories are yours.
• Accelerated vesting when close: If you were within two weeks of your next milestone, we moved your last day
• Transition introductions: Everyone leaving today was in good standing at Tome. If you’d like, we’d be happy to introduce you to our VC recruiting teams so they can place you at a portfolio company. Separately, leaders at a couple of high growth tech companies are interested in hiring former Tome employees. I’m happy to facilitate personal introductions.

For those of us who are staying on, this hard decision will take a moment to process, especially in light of all the other changes we’ve seen this year. We’ll host an all hands at 10am PT to answer questions and discuss how to move forward.

I want to thank all of you for the hard work, dedication, and grit it’s taken for us to pivot this year. I’m grateful for the impact you’ve had on Tome’s trajectory. While the next few years will require more of the same, I’m confident that we’ll be building up from here on.