I met several members of their engineering team in Jan 2015 in Brooklyn after their first dev meetup where Tom debuted global web annotations. Every engineer there was top notch. You could tell by how much attention they dedicated to very meta level stuff.

There are other reasons for letting people go than poor performance. Sadly.

I guess they decided against being a tech company and decided to go full media company where tech is a cost center and engineers are replaceable.

I think the article hinted at that.

Lisa Wray?

Yeah. :)

I interviewed at Genius and started following her because of "Blondes make better engineers" tagline, it cracked me up.