I took it as after laying people off they were able to actually make money and a year later they were making enough to do extravagant events. With the limited context it doesn't sound the best. With different framing it's more reasonable but I probably wouldn't have included it in the article.
I'm not sure I see where this "year later" is derived from in the article.
This is what the relevant section of the article says as I read it now:
After 4 months of failed pitches (in a process we organized poorly) the only option we had left was to cut expenses and break
even (here is how to organize a good process). We let a lot of good people go and doubled down on generating the advertising
dollars we needed to stay alive. Within 2 months we went from burning $250k a month to making $100k a month and we ended the
year at $8m in revenue and $1m in profit (Suhail, co-founder of Mixpanel, describes that tactic in a great tweet). We even
took all of our employees to Hawaii to celebrate
Starting at some point in time, they spent 4 months failing then 2 months in correction, then ended the year profitable and celebrated.
If t0 was in late June, the delta between the 6-month ordeal and the celebration would have been zero. If t0 was in early January, it would've been six months. (Plus/minus a month depending on calendar/fiscal year.)
given the phrasing I’m working on the assumption that they didn’t end up >$250k net income/profit (not clear what the $100k number refers to) soon after getting in the black. Given that they were in the red before, they still had some losses to work through before they could start building towards that $1M profit. The one year timeline sounds about right
