Sonder

How it happened

Sonder leased apartments and ran them as tech-enabled short-term rentals, debuting via SPAC at roughly a $2.2B market cap in January 2022. A brutal post-listing slide and persistent losses left it near worthless; after Marriott terminated a 20-year licensing deal, Sonder filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in November 2025. Staff braced for years: Glassdoor reviews counted layoffs roughly every six months since 2021, jobs offshored to the Philippines, and skeleton crews doing several jobs for one paycheck. Insiders said the Marriott partnership piled on work while pay stagnated, and the shutdown was abrupt — reviewers described roughly 1,400 staff let go mid-shift, many learning of it from the news and never paid promised severance.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.