Is this confirmed? More sources?
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Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
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Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#12Stripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
Seems like everyone was in a hiring spree in 2020 and 2021.
This is my take on it. Everyone went crazy on hiring. Nothing is crashing, it's just the market returning to normal. Well, except for Meta. They're having a bad time lol.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#13Stripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
> Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
I don't think you can only cut "poor performers" in any sort of bulk layoffs. You can avoid it in aggregate, but there will be enough mistakes, enough teams that need to cut a number but don't have enough poor performers, or even enough high performers who are just on teams that are deemed no longer necessary.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#14Is this confirmed? More sources?
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#15Stripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
> Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group. I don't think you can only cut "poor performers" in any sort of bulk layoffs. You can avoid it in aggregate, but there will be enough mistakes, enough teams that need to cut a number but don't have enough poor performers, or even enough high performers who are just on teams that are deemed no longer necessary…
High performers on redundant teams would almost certainly be transferred, assuming there isn't some odd middle management infighting going on.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group. I don't think you can only cut "poor performers" in any sort of bulk layoffs. You can avoid it in aggregate, but there will be enough mistakes, enough teams that need to cut a number but don't have enough poor performers, or even enough high performers who are just on teams that are deemed no longer necessary…
High performers on redundant teams would almost certainly be transferred, assuming there isn't some odd middle management infighting going on.
I'd hope so, but it's a lot harder to identify the high performers, figure out where to transfer them to, cut low performers from the teams they're moving to, etc. Unfortunately much easier to just cut teams as the company cuts scope.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#17Stripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
> after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Would be useful to see some charts of all those "hiring sprees" that happened during the last 2 years at the big US tech companies, and how the curves on those charts would compare to "normalized" charts had the pandemic/hiring sprees not existed (i.e. if the headcount in 2020-2021 would have increased following the same hiring trends of 2019, 2018 etc).
Collison's email says this layoff returns Stripe to it's February (presumably 2022) headcount.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#18“On Tuesday we set a new record for total daily transaction volume processed.”
How does a company breaking records 36 hours ago conclude they need to lay off 14% of the workforce? Even with economic storm clouds on the horizon that seems very jumpy.
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#19Stripe did seem to be somewhat overstaffed after the huge hiring spree in the last 2 years. Though the bottom 14% is a pretty big amount to cut, almost certainly some decent performers in that group.
Why didn't Stripe SPAC or IPO during the boom?
I imagine they could've went for 10-20x their current value like most IPOs during that time...
IIUC - Stripe actually has good financials.
As a comparison - Twitter had ~7500 employees. Stripe had ~8000.
So I wouldn't be surprised if they have room to cut ~14%. Though, I'm interested why now.
Are they planning to IPO soon or something? It just doesn't seem like a good time for that...
Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
#20> In making these changes, you might reasonably wonder whether Stripe’s leadership made some errors of judgment. We’d go further than that. In our view, we made two very consequential mistakes, and we want to highlight them here since they’re important:
> - We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.
> - We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.
https://stripe.com/br/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-em...