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Zoom lays off 15% of employees

blog.zoom.us

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Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#2
TLDR: We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues.

Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267

ZM stock: 83.26 +6.19 (+8.03%) - thats a profit of 400mil on the day for the CEO.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#5
> We have made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15% and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ZM/zoom-video-comm...

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2022 was 6,787, a 53.48% increase from 2021.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2021 was 4,422, a 74.64% increase from 2020.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2020 was 2,532, a 48.77% increase from 2019.

Zoom Video Communications total number of employees in 2019 was 1,702, a INF% increase from 2018.

Probably not the most up to date/accurate info.

If 1300 is 15% of their workforce, they are up to 8.6k employees, headed back down to 7366, still all time high.

Did they really think COVID lifestyle was going to stay forever and their business would be gangbusters forever?

What % of their 7000-8000 employees (ignoring any contractors I guess) are engineers? 60%?

4200 engineers to work on an app that at its core is... video conferencing?

> Zoom has 300 million users in meetings daily. 89% of zoom users use it for work meetings. 73.41 million downloads of the Zoom app were recorded worldwide in the first quarter of 2022.

https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+daily+active+users

What new features have they rolled out past 12 months that justify needing 4,000 engineers/project managers/product managers/QA team/dev ops/whatever fulltime?

I'd really like to learn the truth to why this statement is wrong: "The average person has more business sense than the CEO of Zoom and its entire board of executives who allowed rampant hiring because I could've guessed during COVID, despite the surge in demand given all of the work-from-home during lockdowns, my company most likely won't grow forever, therefore I won't triple my staff over the next 3 years and then need to just end up laying them off"

Like there's no way it's just that simple. Google says the CEO is worth between $4bn and $25bn. He has to be smarter than the average bear. What am I missing?

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#7
He is taking a 98% paycut on salary and foregoing his bonus, but I wonder what his equity based comp is as a % of his total comp. My guess is he is mostly compensated in equity.

Re: Zoom lays off 15% of employees

#8
> As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today– and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus. Members of my executive leadership team will reduce their base salaries by 20% for the coming fiscal year while also forfeiting their FY23 corporate bonuses.

It’s nice to see the phrase “I am accountable” followed by a description of what that accountability entails.

Whether or not the steps taken seem fair is a separate conversation, but it seems like a step in the right direction.

When you’re making CEO salary, no amount of salary reduction will have a day to day impact, but this seems strongly symbolic at least.

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