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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#261

Post by noirbot »

tester756 wrote: post #201
noirbot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

Discord had small engineering team and they outperformed Teams, Google's VoIPs, Skype, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Zoom

Have they outperformed Zoom and Teams? That feels like a stretch, even if I prefer Discord to either of them

Plus, they had a small team, but I met most of them back in the Hammer and Chisel days and they were already a 20 person team at that point at least.

I'm not at all trying to say you can't have a good product with a small company. It's the incessant "I could do this myself in a month. I won't actually do it, but I totally could" responses. Almost every company you've heard of isn't getting by on single-digit employees, let alone one very smart person.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#262

Post by Rekksu »

BryanBeshore wrote: post #42

Full post from Jack Conte's Instagram post: "Hi everyone - I have some sad news to share: today, Patreon is doing a layoff of about 80 employees, about 17% of our team. This was ultimately my decision, so I wanted you all to hear directly from me about the reasoning. Before I do, I want to say two things: first, today will be painful for many people, and I am deeply sorry to the incredible teammates who will be leavi…

> To ensure that we make progress on that roadmap, we are increasing our investment in product, engineering, and design, which means decreasing our spend on other ares of the company.

Underrated dynamic in the startup layoffs this year. Many software companies grew headcount rapidly in areas outside of prod / eng in 2021 and are now scaling back those roles while preserving the talent that was extremely difficult to hire.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#263

Post by phpisthebest »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #214
rdl wrote: post #46

Earlier 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".

This is what a layoff means no? My understanding was "Fired = Your Fault" and "Laid Off = Your Employer's Fault". Is it possible to be "laid off" for performance reasons?

some companies have a policy to layoff the bottom x% of "lowest performers" so yes it is possible to be laid off for performance reasons.

For example "The bottom 10% of salesmen by sales volume"

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#264

Post by oldgradstudent »

kevstev wrote: post #82
seibelj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have your stock down 60% YoY (META) without consequence. There is a whole lot of fat at both of these companies (and really all large firms that never had any bad quarters) and a reckoning has to happen

You absolutely can. Stock price is really meaningless as far as the day to day life of a company is concerned- if your cash flows haven't changed, and the market has just decided to shit on you for a bit for irrational reasons there are no consequences other than maybe looking into whether a buyback makes sense. Equity markets are often irrational and wrong. IE Covid- essentially every stock was down significantly in…

> Stock price is really meaningless as far as the day to day life of a company is concerned

Not when significant part of your employee compensation is equity-based.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#265

Post by phpisthebest »

ShamelessC wrote: post #184
ArchOversight wrote: post #52

This is somewhat meta, but linking to an instagram post is terrible, I get immediately redirected to a login page and can't even see the content on Instagram. I do not have an instagram account, nor do I want to create one just to see this. Was there no better place to link to?

This happens more and more when I visit Twitter now, too. _Really_ annoying and I have zero intention of creating an account on either of those sites.

if you are using firefox on the desktop you can prevent all cookies for the site than that goes away. Free the browse with no popup for login

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#266

Post by phpisthebest »

AngeloR wrote: post #169

I 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/

Patreon decline had 3 Phases

1. Censorship which caused a market reaction for more competition, and the first mass exit of the platform

2. Changes in the Fee Structure and billing policies, this caused the 2nd mass exit from the platform

3. Platforms getting better at internal monetization (i.e YT SuperChat and memberships)

There has been little advancement of of the patreon platform, and with more and more competition from other direct compeitors (subscribestar, etc) and different monetization avenues (TeeSpring,etc) there is little reason for creators to use patreon outside of the network effect, and since they are not growing that effect is smaller every day

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#267

Post by noirbot »

gamblor956 wrote: post #240
noirbot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a nickle for every time someone on HN claims that a sizable company could be replaced by 1-5 devs, I'd have enough money to start a competitor to most of them that did it better with more devs/staff, as evidenced by the general lack of 1 person saas companies out there that solve more than a very niche problem.

He's not wrong. Patreon's technical platform isn't cutting edge or unique and could be replicated fairly quickly by a small team in a month or two. Most of what makes Patreon what it is comes from the other parts of the company, i.e., the marketers, account managers, etc., that bring in the actual revenue. Of course, that's also the reason why a tiny company can't just replace Patreon: it's not the tech that matters.…

Is that true? I feel like every past discussion about Patreon, as well as from the folks I know who use it as artists, they're not really getting much in terms of marketing or assistance/management. I certainly have a hard time believing that they're making most of their money from their "services" outside of just relaying money.

Their discovery is pretty awful too. My understanding is that they're mostly viable because there's no easier way to solicit money as a podcast/youtube channel right now.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#269

Post by Akronymus »

ShamelessC wrote: post #184
ArchOversight wrote: post #52

This is somewhat meta, but linking to an instagram post is terrible, I get immediately redirected to a login page and can't even see the content on Instagram. I do not have an instagram account, nor do I want to create one just to see this. Was there no better place to link to?

This happens more and more when I visit Twitter now, too. _Really_ annoying and I have zero intention of creating an account on either of those sites.

Reddit also, if it is deemed sensitive.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#270

Post by purpleblue »

jrockway wrote: post #163
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I was born in the 60s and haven't been laid off yet, including during the dotcom bust, all while working for 12+ companies in my career. The bust was the worst, though, our company went through 7+ layoffs and we were decimated, and no one did any real work after a while. Fingers crossed that I can keep this trend until retirement!
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