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Patreon laying off 20% of staff

patreon.com

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Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#81

Post by everforward »

cmiles8 wrote: post #28

Honestly the most interesting thing to me here is that to took nearly 500 people to run Patreon.

That doesn’t super shock me. They claim to have sent over $150M to creators in 2017, which is probably several million transactions. I think they do video and image hosting as well, not sure. It’s probably way more now but that’s the most recent number I saw.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were over a billion in revenue at this point.

I would imagine big chunks of the company also aren’t technology. They seem like they have a sizable PR and marketing presence, community liaisons (read: support), HR to support it all, legal for dealing with illicit content that ends up there instead of OnlyFans, etc.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#82

Post by dtech »

yonisto wrote: post #54
cmiles8 wrote: post #28

Honestly the most interesting thing to me here is that to took nearly 500 people to run Patreon.

I really don't get. Twitter used to have 7500 employees and now it is working perfectly ok with 1500~ What am I missing from business perspective?

Twitter had a lot of side projects and people that were not needed to run their core business. E.g. they used to have a Linux kernel engineering team [1]. They argued their value, but I was always a tad skeptical. Even if they earned their keep in terms of ROI, Twitter can definitely be run without kernel engineers.

[1] https://danluu.com/in-house/

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#83

Post by powerpcmac »

pgwhalen wrote: post #41
powerpcmac wrote: post #5

The rich get richer and the poor get more AI edited and toned condolence posting.

As someone not good at identifying this myself, what about this post indicates AI editing?

In the year of our Lord 2026 when you can be fired for not churning enough tokens, you can believe any corpo-post corpo speak has been checked by their LLMs for "compassionate voicing" and "low risk wording"

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#84

Post by egormakarov »

coliveira wrote: post #33
tombert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that they must teach in business school or something that you never, ever, EVER acknowledge or admit that things have ever or will ever go bad in your business. I’ve worked for startups that will show massive customer churn, tell us that this is “actually a good thing”, do massive layoffs the next week because of the churn, and even while talking about the layoffs say that they’re stronger than ever. I’ve bee…

Business schools teach advertising, not business management. In modern business it is a crime to tell the truth about the dire situation a business is in, unless a CEO is starting anew to fix a situation left by another, and even then it rarely happens.

Same with dentists

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#85

Post by [deleted] »

sokoloff wrote: post #31

> A $1,500 stipend to replace your company laptop. It seems like a wild choice to give a specific figure as additional cash rather than just letting them keep their (wiped) laptop. That additional cash will be taxed (as should a laptop that is left with the ex-employee, but the used laptop can be valued and taxed as a used laptop rather than a $1500 cash payment [and frankly would often be, um, overlooked...). It see…

[deleted]

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#88

Post by ricardobayes »

ab71e5 wrote: post #60
codegeek wrote: post #42

The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these me…

Exactly. I would be insulted if I was part of this layoff, brutal honesty would be much better

Not trying to be snarky, but how exactly? How would it help your mental health to be told "your work was borderline useless anyway and we needed to get rid of you to boost shareholder value. Goodbye!"

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#89

Post by ltbarcly3 »

K0balt wrote: post #70
codegeek wrote: post #42

The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these me…

It’s because, and I say this as a person who has made these calls, some leaders do feel a genuine responsibility for the people that work for them. Perhaps too, the ones that don’t, want people to think that they do. But as a founder and CEO by far the most emotionally taxing thing I have ever had to do is cut staff for the good of the company. You want to treat people the way you would want to be treated if you were…

They feel a genuine responsibility to avoid the buzzing sound in their head that results from trying to believe and make other people believe they feel a genuine responsibility for people while taking actions that are the polar opposite of anything that you do to someone you feel responsible for purely to increase your own and your investors wealth.

It's fine to fire people, and the severance here is very generous. Business leaders who need to feel like they are a generous parent or 'different' are weak and lying to themselves.

Finally while the severance is generous and to be applauded, all of the phrasing under the guise of caring about people was very transparently just an excuse to say over and over "we are making money and we aren't doing this because we have to" to his investors, which just rubs it in the face of the people being fired over and over. One final insult I guess.

Re: Patreon laying off 20% of staff

#90

Post by morkalork »

josefresco wrote: post #8
spwa4 wrote: post #2

What is it with companies doing mass-layoffs and stating no reasons whatsoever, in fact giving reasons why there's no need: > Second, Patreon’s core business is healthy and strong, and we’re going to be a rock for creators for decades to come. Hundreds of thousands of creators rely on Patreon for their livelihoods, businesses, ... > We’re reducing the size of our team by 20%, or ...

> At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. I guess this is the "reason" but obviously they aren't elaborating. It's odd they picked "6 months" - what changed in "the market"?

Despite what they're saying, I'd guess it's the totally-not-a-recession that's happening and they foresee people cutting luxury expenses (ie patreon subs) and they're trying to get ahead of it.
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