A day after the hostage crisis ended at TinyOwl, the company said it continued to receive threat mails from its employees, especially in Delhi. According to a top management source, one of the disgruntled employees from Delhi sent them a mail on Friday saying, “Agar tum 5 ho toh, hum 100 hain.” ( If you are 5, we are 100).
Company officials told FE that the situation is still not under control. Last evening after all the founders were released by the employees, Harshvardhan Mandad, the CEO and co founder of TinyOwl came up with an official statement that the company is now working towards fulfilling demands beyond the terms of employment. The company has said that Mandad never wanted to fire his employees and that the plan was to credit their accounts with a one month salary along with an assured full and final settlement which would eventually be credited in a period of 45 days. However the employees demanded that they deserved at least two months of salary with a notice period of two months.
“Mandad and team are now working towards making sure that all the deserving employees get placed in other organisations through their personal network,” said a company source.
Founded in 2014 by five IIT graduates, TinyOwl initially emerged as a promising start-up however in the past few months it has been receiving negative feedback from customers. One such user told FE that there was an instance where he had ordered for food and had to wait for two hours just to find out that the order was canceled and worse the company also failed to pay his cash back. After repeatedly contacting them, TinyOwl sent a coffee mug along with a sorry note.
The management however has a different story to tell, “ Handling customers can be tough at times, these are problems that every start-up faces, be it TinyOwl, Swiggy or Foodpanda and the customer team is responsible for looking into such matters. But at times even customers refuse to cooperate and they would ask their cash without sharing their account details,” adds a source from TinyOwl.
Earlier this week TinyOwl had announced that as a part of their restructuring process they would be letting go over 100 employees with an aim to reduce expenses. This is the second time that TinyOwl is downsizing in past two months. It had laid-off around 200 employees in September and according to the previously laid off employees, the company is yet to clear their settlements, leading to the revolt.
“If they can go to the extent of getting goons and politicians involved in this then they are capable of doing anything,” a source from the top management said, adding that the crisis was far from over for the once promising startup.