271–280 of 1001 posts
Doing their new hires a disservice, when in many cases they'll likely have to be laid off within the year. Looking at big tech here, primarily
I feel bad for employees that have waited a decade to cash out. No reason why Stripe couldn’t have gone public in 2020-2021 at a huge valuation but from past interviews it sounds like the decision to remain private was just a founder preference thing because “focus” or something. Now the IPO market is completely frozen and its valuation is likely cut in half from peak, at least.
The second they go public it triggers a 6-12 months window after which all of their employees can cash out. This will, inexorably lead to an exodus of their most senior peeps, and when it happens, will probably be ground zero for the next gen of fintech startups. Delaying going IPO this way, amongst other things, is about retention.
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i hate this trend of ceos saying they take responsibility. Reminds me of lord farquuad, "some of you may die, but that is a price i'm willing to pay"
I think whatever a leader does which isn’t ritual suicide when announcing layoffs is going to get criticism. People in power hired when expecting an uptick and fired when expecting a downtick.
Is that ritual suicide?
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Not sure if frantically interviewing for a new job during the holidays when lots of tech companies are also laying people off can be considered a vacation.
They have 3.5mos. I find it unlikely someone’s market value dropped enough that they could once be a Stripe employee but they’re now unemployable.
> 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. This is one of the most interesting statements ever written. If you ran a 'Idea Fourier' on this signal, so many things fall out: cheap interest rates pushes crazy valuations and estimations, believing the low interest fantasy was a requirement to gettin…
Hey pc, if you're around: > John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it. What are the two of you doing to show accountability? Are you slashing your own future stock grants, cutting your own salaries, diluting your positions with stock grants to everyone else? What's the consequence for this decision on your end that shows you're accountable for what happened, not just responsible for it? Sinc…
Ya know.... Founders and CEO's are responsible every day. They created the business for people to have jobs, they have to deal with it when the business cannot support the jobs. When things in the macro economy change, sometimes the business can't operate at the same level it was before. People like to on CEO's & leaders in good times, but employees often forget that while the employee can just go get another job, th…
...can usually afford to never work again!
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As a European the severance for a large company doesn’t sound all to different to what I am used to. Normally you have 3 months by contract plus some add a month per year tenure. Healthcare costs, career support etc is normal for larger/successful companies. Then certain countries (not the company) will pay 80percent of your salary for 2 years to find a new job. Happy that some companies also start to do this in the…
>As a European the severance for a large company doesn’t sound all to different to what I am used to. IME 14 weeks minimum is really generous in the US. I've been at 2 companies where it was 1 week per year of employment. At one company they added on 1 month of severance during a really large layoff. The tenure at tech companies in the US tends to be quite short, so getting 14 weeks probably unusual at typical tech c…
Stripe 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.
somewhat? It has 8 THOUSAND employees to run a payment processor.
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A lot of people would genuinely prefer for companies to never make risky investments in growth, yes. If you’ve ever wondered how the Japanese norm of lifetime employment can be sustained, this is why; many employees prefer it to a system where they might discover one day that their job was dependent on a speculative investment that didn’t pan out.
My understanding is that Japan is a really bad place to be a worker.
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That first point is key, and I think they're being... less than honest. The reality is there's very little evidence for an actual "broader slowdown". GDP growth in the US was decent in the last quarter despite a huge decline in home sales and headwinds from inflation, and unemployment remains at record lows. There's certainly some signs for concern, but the only real, persistent decline has been in the stock market (…
>The reality is there's very little evidence for an actual "broader slowdown". I'm not sure about 'broader slowdown' but in the industry I'm in we've seen a massive slowdown in signups and expansions in the existing customers. When we speak with our customers, especially banks, they are seeing massive slowdowns on their side. Someone has bad metrics here, and when most of our customers across a wide range of industri…