Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

blog.patreon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 456 posts

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#331

Post by squeaky-clean »

gruez wrote: post #286
squeaky-clean wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant that in response to why Discord can be so successful with 1% of the employees of other chat products. It's because they're not actually similar products. One is for casual chat (with no pretense of security) and one is for business chat.

It's not specifically about avoiding enterprise, it's about them recognizing what sort of business decisions are sustainable with small team capabilities. Enterprise chat adds a TON of requirements and harsher penalties for mistakes.

In Patreon's case, it's one of those business models that a small team just cannot survive in at scale.

Sure, storing some payment data in a database and charging a payment API once a month in a job queue is a weekend project. But then you get your first email about a stolen credit card being used. And one from Disney lawyers about how someone is using their Patreon account to sell Disney intellectual property. And an email from FBI because someone is using it to sell illegal images. And from creators whose account got hacked and all their payments redirected to a new bank account. Or the subscribers who want a refund because they're unhappy. Or the people who realize that if you say your credit card was stolen, you can access the exclusive content from any creator and get a refund the next day.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#332

Post by kradeelav »

voxl wrote: post #185
kradeelav wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscribestar, which I'm much more of a fan of since they have more common sense rules around NSFW art.

Common sense rules == completely banning all NSFW work? https://www.subscribestar.com/prohibited_content I'm all for having some SFW platforms, but let's not pretend that there isn't a dramatic, dramatic demand for NSFW content, and that banning it is nothing short of prudish.

No? Last time I understood from my artist friends who do kinky NSFW art (as do I), they use SubscribeStar's NSFW version, right over here if you missed it - (https://subscribestar.adult/)

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#333

Post by 0x457 »

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 don't think you can be a competent manager if that's not how you think.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#334

Post by ruskyhacker »

unity1001 wrote: post #59
codegeek wrote: post #23

A blog post was done other than Instagram: https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack "but as the world began recovering from the pandemic and enduring a broader economic slowdown, that plan is no longer the right path forward for Patreon" So basically, they overhired to meet demands during Pandemic and now as less people are using the platform (??), there is no need for the 17% of people. Interesting.

> So basically, they overhired to meet demands during Pandemic Everybody did, even anticipating that the move to online economy would slow down after the pandemic. But nobody predicted the Ukraine war, sanctions, and the economic effect those sanctions made back in the West.

Lol at that last statement.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#335

Post by Kalium »

unity1001 wrote: post #291
jzb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some unkind feelings about Patreon when it was announced / made public that they laid off their entire security team. I still think that was a poor move and any company responsible for handling payments ought to have an in-house security team. That said - I've held off on any criticisms around their strategy/execution for the moment (aside from that) since it's unclear what happened. I'm wondering if Patreon is…

They didn't lay off their entire security team. What one person among the laid off ones thought to be 'security team' may not overlap with what their company had been doing since a long time. In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).

> In startups, its not uncommon to have engineers who have been handling various responsibilities, including security (especially early employees).

You're right!

That said, by the time a company is large enough that 17% of it is more than 17 people the kind of startup organization you have wisely and correctly nodded to will have ceased to exist.

So while you are right in that such scenarios have, do, and will continue to happen there's perhaps cause to wonder if that's really the best way to characterize replacing a security organization with specialists with a bunch of engineers who are likely quarter-time security at best. It's akin to firing all your engineers because the sales people can do a little bit of coding each.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#336

Post by hyperhopper »

COGlory wrote: post #290
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…

It means he takes the blame, but doesn't face the consequences.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#337

Post by gamblor956 »

noirbot wrote: post #267
gamblor956 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beca…

That's a problem with the people, not with the tech. They overhired without training people into the roles they were hired for.

On discovery: Tiktok, for example, is absolutely slaying Insta, Snap, and Twitter. Tiktok uses human curation; the other 3 use an algorithm.

Note that Patreon takes a % of all transactions, so the key driver is increasing transactions. They don't need fancy new tech for that; they need more human interaction.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#339

Post by sk5t »

avg_dev wrote: post #320
aeyes wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps I’ve had bad luck but I’ve never had options that would have been worth anything.

That's regular luck, or at least not bad. Options worth > $0 is an occasion of very, very good luck.

Re: Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff

#340

Post by chihuahua »

smm11 wrote: post #249
cafed00d wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any former employee is a future potential employee that you can re-recruit when the time comes Not only that, all former employees are de-facto "background check references" / "evagenlists" / "detractors" of your company. Forever! (well, not exactly forever... but close enough) I can't recall a single year over the last 10 years where younger engineers, cousins, nephews or friends have asked me about the 2 companie…

Seems Amazon needs to be careful about this, too. https://retailwire.com/discussion/there-might-soon-be-no-one...

Amazon has really developed "not giving a shit" into an art form. They even still have the cliff vesting of RSUs, which is their way of telling new hires "we don't expect you to stay for more than 2 years"
Post reply on HN