80 / .17 = 470 employees.
How does Patreon need this many employees? It really doesn't seem like that much of an operation.
Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
161–170 of 456 posts
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#162Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?
I've wondered this as well. Look at Uber, how are they not profitable? How many more engineers/general personnel do they possibly need to hire?
Because taxi business isn't actually that great business. You have to employ lot of relatively expensive drivers and they have to pay for costs of complex machine... And the users want to get it as cheap as possible and complain somewhat if prices ever go up.
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of this is because of the WARN Act in California [0], which requires 60-day notice before any mass layoff. Employers can also fulfill the requirements of this mandate by letting employees go now but having their actual termination date 60+ days in advance. I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. Good for Patreon to go beyond the 60-day mandated period though [0] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Traini…
> I've been survived a few layoffs that work this way. How many times have you been laid off?!
There are probably a large number of HN readers that have weathered the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2022 financial crisis. If you were born 1980-ish and you haven't been laid off 3 times, congrats!
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#164Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?
Because if you stop at #2... 1) you won't attract any follow-on investment capital; 2) your original investor will be angry that you're sitting on a pile of money that is doing nothing; 3) you will likely grow slower than your other competitors. in some markets, this is death, in other markets, this is fine. Patreon had nearly 500 staff before layoffs. Now has about 400 staff. You may have a hard time understanding w…
+1
That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth.
Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#165Hmm -- how is Gumroad doing? Is their business affected by the same economic slowdown issues, or did they find another way forward?
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main significance here is "please hire the people we're letting go as if they were normal Patreon employees you'd want to poach; they weren't let go for performance or other individual reasons".
They seem to have contracted a placement company to do that.
Yes, and the parent's point is that companies that end up looking at those people's resumes are going to know that they were not let go because of poor performance. What the parent said.
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#167Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. That's not the social contract for employment. It's dangerous to think it is. There's a mutual need from both parties. When that need changes, both parties are free to respond. Forcing a company to keep someone would be just as bad as forcing someone to stay. What we also don't know is the companies financial situation. Keeping people on when they can't be afforded can be a way to make a company completely collap…
What are you responding to, exactly? That comment was claiming that we can't know for sure that "nobody" would lose their livelihood over this. And it's true, we can't know.
I think they are responding to the assertion that the employer is obligated to keep the employee just because the employee might have absolutely nowhere else to go. Especially in the competitive tech space neither you nor your employer are obligated to maintain your employment relationship.
This is besides Patreon giving their former employees a license to goof off on their dime for 3 months. I can’t imagine anyone at Patreon being so hard up that 3 months pay and insurance to look for new work is enough to break the camels back.
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#169I think this is just the start for some bad things are patreon...
This video of execs at Patreon apparently turning a blind eye to employees calling out patreon users that were selling images of underage children: https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1315626557688483841?s=20...
They also laid off their ENTIRE security team: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/09/patreon-security-layoffs/
Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
#170Feel like the real story is a bunch of competitors are eating their lunch.
Who are those competitors? The subject company is tho only one I know of like this. But I am not really active in the creative space so I'm ignorant.
ko-fi.com seems to morph more and more into a competitor.