[lordnacho]

What kind of business are you in? Quite hard to understand without hearing what kind of thing you're doing.

Sounds like you want to buy yourself some runway, and the only way to do that is to let go of staff. Alternatively offer people equity-for-salary, because your equity ought to be cheap now.

Sounds pretty stressful, don't beat yourself up over it. Wanting to do well for the investors is good, but everyone knows about the principal-agent problem, and they could have aligned your incentives better. It's exactly this case they should have thought about, what do I do if the founder is in a position where they want to drop everything, blowing up the business, because they won't get anything out of it?