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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

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Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#281

Post by pentagrama »

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 use Ublock Origin, you can enable the "annoyances" filter and the Twitter login overlay is removed.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#282

Post by aeyes »

avg_dev wrote: post #208
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #53

This bit from the employee announcement about how they're handling equity vesting [1] is worth highlighting as a pretty classy move, all things considered: > We’re waiving the one-year equity vesting cliff for all departing employees so that everyone has an opportunity to be a shareholder, regardless of your tenure. [...] All departing teammates will qualify for an extended option exercise period of 5 years, and we h…

I am sure this says more about me than anything but if a company lays me off there is zero chance of me exercising options in that company. Edit: I read the link and it appears to apply to RSUs as well. What I said about options is true but RSUs, different story. I’d sell those for sure.

Why not? Options are usually "in the money" so if you don't exercise them you are throwing away money which you already earned.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#283

Post by lmarcos »

lxe wrote: post #93

Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?

Please don't give away the secret sauce. Let those silly entrepreneurs and investors keep playing with fire.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#284

Post by bcrescimanno »

weego wrote: post #177
db579 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are things the company is doing to take responsibility, not him personally which is what his statement should imply.

When you're +$400mil into venture capital raises 'the company' doing something like that can be an awful lot of time, effort and potentially political capital for a CEO to get through. I'm astounded that so many supposed seasoned leaders were out there making crazy projections around maintaining covid levels of growth and I also don't think 'my bad' is enough in that context, but benefits above what's required are ra…

I'd share your surprise; but, I sometimes question if they believed it themselves. I've spent the last 15 years in public companies and if there's one thing "The Street" demands, it's growth upon growth. The context of a pandemic being a once-in-a-lifetime event is meaningless. Your business experienced record growth and we expect you to continue that trajectory of increased growth no matter what--so get to investing for it!

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#285

Post by cbozeman »

rchaud wrote: post #186
cbozeman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like people didn't read the statement at all. He clearly says they're going to invest more into engineering and some other shit... so it's not about money. They're going to spend more fucking money. This sounds like a bunch of people got their jobs automated away through algorithms or intelligent systems or just whatever innovation you wanna chalk it up to, and they redundant to the company, so they gotta go. Th…

Forget about CEO, could you even be a competent manager if that's how you think?

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but this is how an extraordinarily large amount of high-level individuals think - they just won't admit it.

If you're able to automate a large portion of your workforce, why wouldn't you? You'll be rewarded for it in every aspect. You'll be praised by the Board of Directors for cutting costs and improving productivity (since algorithms and robots don't have to sleep, never get tired, never call in sick, never get drunk and shit in their husband's bed, etc.). You'll be praised by Wall Street as a "visionary, technologically-minded thinker / leader".

There's zero downside for you.

There's enormous downside for parts of society.

The difference is, I'm willing to admit that when I do this, it's directly to my benefit.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#286

Post by gruez »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #220
tester756 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've been pretty adamant about not chasing after business/enterprise sales and I bet this is a big reason why. Enterprise pays the big bucks but also has way higher demands from support, higher expectations about downtime, and all the third party integration requests. It has to integrate with Jira, it has to integrate with Google Calendar, it has to integrate with this niche service that changes their API every mo…

Okay but it doesn't seem like patreon needs to, or is even chasing after enterprise sales? At least in the b2c space it doesn't seem like you need a huge engineering team.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#287

Post by ransom1538 »

lxe wrote: post #93

Every SV company: 1. Start a company that does a thing well 2. Hire enough people to do the thing well 3. For some reason, hire more and more people to do more and more random things 4. Hire more managers who hire even more people 5. You are now a complicated mess and can't get anything done 6. Run out of money 7. Fire people and write a sad post. Continue to collect hefty CEO salary. Why not just stop at 2?

If you take VC money you are on a different track. VC's place thousands of bets with a %99.9 failure rate. But the hits, are so huge, they cover all their bad bets. So they want you to take the money and swing for fences.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#288

Post by nonethewiser »

Rekksu wrote: post #262
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…

Their career page really bears this out. Lots of open engineering positions.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#289

Post by [deleted] »

flavmartins wrote: post #164
rmah wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you stop at #2... 1) you won't attract any follow-on investment capital; 2) your original investor will be angry that you're sitting on a pile of money that is doing nothing; 3) you will likely grow slower than your other competitors. in some markets, this is death, in other markets, this is fine. Patreon had nearly 500 staff before layoffs. Now has about 400 staff. You may have a hard time understanding w…

+1 That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth. Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.

[deleted]

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#290

Post by COGlory »

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…

>I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team.

What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again?

I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without actually taking any responsibility. It seems like the laid off employees are taking responsibility.

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