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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#111
post #59
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

executives should be compensated for the performance of the company in the future, not the current quarter or year. this is the board's fault for failing to set effective incentives.

Isn't that what a vesting period is supposed to enforce?

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as their primary investing platform :%s/investing/speculation/g Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard. I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in…

How are you quantifying that the fills are better? I worked professionally on this problem a while ago and it was very hard to do even with full depth feeds direct from the exchanges.

price and execution time? how much slip or price improvement on limits? or god forbid the casual retail market orders fill vs nbbo and pools at exec

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.

Is it charitable to accept responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and compensate those you've harmed? Or is it just common decency?

It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#114
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…

The beauty of corporatism - unlimited upside and no downside.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#115
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…

The Shopify layoff also contained this phrasing. Shows how tone-deaf these CEOs are.

Shopify's version:

> Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#116
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then you'd still have more people than you need, except now everyone is poorly motivated, and your best people will just leave. Germany does actually have a model called "Kurzarbeit" (literally "short work") to reduce hours across the board while some of the wage losses are being offset by payment from the unemployment insurance system. The idea is to avoid layoffs during times of recession etc. which would a…

> ... your best people will just leave. Where is the evidence for this? I get that it seems like what would happen, but where are the cases proving that's what happened? Especially in an economy shedding jobs, there may not be many other places to go. Also, studies seem to find that money doesn't motivate people to perform at a higher level. https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv

The best people (the ones you really don’t want to lose) will always find a place to go.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#117

Quoted post unavailable.

The whole market downturn begun months ago, since November as predicted. [0] That was the exact time to run away.

Many other small companies like Robinhood were one of the first to start downsizing quicker, which really doesn't surprise me since all the cheap money is now gone.

But the actual winners are the C-level executives, the VCs and any of the long term employees who cashed out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#118
A lot of Robin Hood's growth in particular was driven by people gambling their stimulus money because they didn't need it to make ends meet, and by the Fed juicing the markets with low rates for far too long, and by the ridiculous meme stock phenomenon. It was a perfect storm of stupidity.

Personally I'm glad that some sanity is returning to investing, and we are still a long way from getting back to normal.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#119
post #42
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.

The way you know that would never happen is that he said he "takes responsibility".

I'm serious. If there were any risk at all that he might lose a cent, he would never admit anything in a way that could be referenced by a lawyer.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#120
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but also, none of my (investing) friends use Tastyworks, and almost all of them are using RH as their primary investing platform! Companies in hyper-growth stages may hire/fire differently than others.

> as their primary investing platform :%s/investing/speculation/g Very few people use RH as 'investing'. Those will be on boring brokers like Vanguard. I have a Tastyworks account too - the fills are way better than Robinhood's. As expected, since they charge some amount per trade. But that means that the "free" platform will definitely have more users, just because it's supposedly free (even though you pay for it in…

Wow, TIL you can use sed syntax in vi. I'm not a heavy vi user but that's still a handy trick. :-)
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