It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.
Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].
Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.
[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...