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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#41

Post by smsm42 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #21
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when making money became harder. Amazing the number of people I personally know who took 1 year of day trading to be the “norm” and made big life decisions based on their results. From quitting good jobs to buying houses they can’t afford, all because they made big money in 2021 and thought they could keep repeating it every year.

This happened in 1998-1999 too. People got online trading accounts, did great and then decided to try to invest for a living. You should not take investment advice from people who have been doing it less than a decade. It takes time to sort out the lucky from the smart.

Unless you're going to do it for living and really invest hard into educating yourself, I don't think you should also take the investment advice from people who have been doing it for more than a decade, unless the advice is "buy index funds and HODL" (I maybe exaggerate a bit, but boiled down to the essence that'd be it). For a common person that doesn't plan to make a career out of it and spend a lot of time honing one's skills, daytrading is rarely going to pay off, IMHO. You can do it for fun, there are more expensive hobbies probably, but as a means to support yourself in the old age... well, you might get lucky. Or not.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#42

Post by V__ »

paxys wrote: post #29

> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…

If you crash a company against the wall resulting in such a disaster and having to cut so much staff, resigning isn't enough. CEO's should have to pay back big parts of their compensation.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#43

Post by cjrp »

paxys wrote: post #29

> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…

Taking responsibility would mean returning a significant portion of that compensation.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#44

Post by munk-a »

paxys wrote: post #29

> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…

There are talks of "late stage capitalism" all over the place - I think CEO compensation is one of the biggest hallmarks of it. Capitalism is supposed to naturally reward value creation to incentivize further value creation - somehow we've found ourselves in a situation where folks on the bottom of the pyramid aren't going to get incentivized for efficient labour no matter how much value they create - while folks at the top will be gloriously celebrated for even the most abject failures.

Most people are doing their best to be productive and most of their managers are trying to reward these efforts with recognition beyond a "thanks" but it becomes more difficult to do when we have an insane wealth sink at the top of our economy.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#45

Post by jrochkind1 »

paxys wrote: post #29

> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…

I realize it's not something that happens, but I would say "taking responsibility" would mean taking, oh, I dunno, $50M of that $800M in compensation in 2021, and distributing it to those laid off?

(How the hell is your life different with $750M instead of $800M anyway?)

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#46

Post by enticingturtle »

yuan43 wrote: post #34

Why not cut pay across the board? I know this is not the cultural norm, but I am curious how long this norm can persist. Without the ability to cut pay, layoffs are the only option for companies burning cash and losing altitude. That locks pay increases at the same inflated point that the bubble supported but which reality does not. To go one step further, is there a single advanced economy in which pay cuts, rather…

Short answer: your best employees will leave

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#47

Post by ab_testing »

Somehow I feel that all these VC backed firms just add employees for the sake of adding employees.

I use Tastyworks - another free online brokerage that it almost at feature parity with Robinhood. They have stocks, options, futures and even some selective crypto. They also make money using PFOF just like Robinhood.

However on Linkedin, their employee count is less than 100 (99 to be precise) On the other hand, Robinhood was at almost 4000 employees at the start of the year. I think they still have about 80% more employees than where they need to be.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#48

Post by mgfist »

rossdavidh wrote: post #7

"Last year, we staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022..." We are now at the point when we will find out which of the changes to behavior (financial and otherwise) that came about with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic are going to be lasting, and which are not. I…

All of this has already happened. Just look at the stocks of all the pandemic companies. Peleton, Teledoc, Zoom, Docusign and on and on. Pretty much all down 80%+ from their highs.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#49

Post by soneca »

> ”In his message Tuesday, Mr. Tenev said the new round of changes at the company are particularly concentrated in its operations, marketing and program management departments.”

People here on HN often say how bad is to be an engineer in a non-tech company. It seems that it’s much worse to be a non-engineer in a tech company.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#50

Post by jeffbee »

renewiltord wrote: post #20
88840-8855 wrote: post #5

What they write: "As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory – this is on me. " What he totally forgot to mention: "I also take a pay cut to reduce the opex burden on the company and to retain as many FTE as possible"

His salary is like $300k and the stock options he was granted as the pandemic growth hit break even at some $300/share (it's $9/share right now).

In the past year he sold $55 million of shares. Let's don't be too credulous about cries of poverty.
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