On March 25, 2015, the weather in Bellevue, Washington was just warming up enough to play hacky sack, a favorite activity of the employees at the game development studio Her Interactive. That morning, they had something more pressing to think about, though: they couldn’t log into their computers. Server problems, some reasoned. They were confused, yet calm. “But Penny [Milliken, CEO] had booked the conference room downstairs, and there was an HR person we’d never seen there before,” said an employee who was there. “One person went down at a time, and every time they came back up, they’d start packing up their boxes.” At the end of the day, 13 employees—over half the company—no longer had jobs.

















