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> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a perman

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons... The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?

thomasmarcelis 4y ago
Probably same PR company or law firm
vanilla-almond 4y ago
Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook: "...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years." "It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point." https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
- mabbo 4y ago
  Yeah seriously, I read the meta announcement and thought "Did you just steal Tobi's letter and do some find/replace on it?"
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    Something tells me there might be a confounding factor here...
lafreb 4y ago
Not only the structure, the wording is also identical: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history." "Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date." "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." "At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce." "There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this." "There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help." etc.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Corporate robots are the same everywhere.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Also known as best practice. The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
    - swader999 4y ago
      Telling the truth is always better. "I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
      - stingraycharles 4y ago
        I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that. They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
        deltasevennine 4y ago
mysterydip 4y ago
When has there ever been a "permanent acceleration" in revenue growth for any company? Or do I misunderstand what they're saying?
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0xmohit 4y ago
Everybody used the same AI to write the memo.
nemo44x 4y ago
It’s just corporate speak.
Abecid 4y ago
Holy shit you're right
meijer 4y ago
Is this even true? I thought the monetary policy of the Fed (as a reaction to Covid) simply made investments cheaper.
- octodog 4y ago
  Both can be true. But maybe one sounds more sincere than the other.
gbil 4y ago
a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
nibbleshifter 4y ago
> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended Who predicted this? The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued. But my memory may be playing tricks on me.
  - jryhjythtr 4y ago
    The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come). Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
      - jryhjythtr 4y ago
        >The US has given over $8B in aid That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid. >Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.
twawaaay 4y ago
I do not believe the statement. Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible. My take would be: * They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity. * They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs. * They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively. * They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Share value is down everywhere. Where would people move to for better compensation?
  - purpleflame1257 4y ago
    A place with more TC in cash.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      More than Facebook?
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      Does Netflix have 11,000 open positions?
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    I am talking best employees. People who will find good job no matter what. People you need to keep because they are actually the ones who make the show going. You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested. So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
pyb 4y ago
This layoff almost sounds like an opportunistic decision, rather than something that was planned long in advance.
refurb 4y ago
Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos. When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
shafyy 4y ago
I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.
- bombcar 4y ago
  They thought it would be a paradigm shift and didn’t want to be caught out and dinosaured. For them that risk was much greater.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course). They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
- grey-area 4y ago
  They were willing for their new employees to take that risk.
pachico 4y ago
Someone used https://quillbot.com/ https://quillbot.com/ with that memo and replaced the company name. Job done!
- 0xmohit 4y ago
  It seems to do an awful job. Input: "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." Results in: "When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    This reads like a grade schooler trying to plagiarize something with his first thesaurus. I am disappointed by AI every day.
    - sodality2 4y ago
      It's deterministic based off the same input, so it doesn't look like AI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
seydor 4y ago
the % of workers fired is also the same everywhere. As if a single nefarious overlord is running the Valley
rtanks 4y ago
Agree
geniium 4y ago
OpenAI rephrase
gz5 4y ago
Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different: + Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business. + On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue. + The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
arbitrary_name 4y ago
The same HR/layoff consultants were used by both leadership teams, i believe.

thomasmarcelis 4y ago

Probably same PR company or law firm

vanilla-almond 4y ago

Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook: "...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years." "It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point." https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team

mabbo 4y ago
Yeah seriously, I read the meta announcement and thought "Did you just steal Tobi's letter and do some find/replace on it?"
- andromeduck 4y ago
  Something tells me there might be a confounding factor here...

lafreb 4y ago

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history." "Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date." "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." "At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce." "There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this." "There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help." etc.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Corporate robots are the same everywhere.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Also known as best practice. The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
  - swader999 4y ago
    Telling the truth is always better. "I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
    - stingraycharles 4y ago
      I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that. They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
      - deltasevennine 4y ago

mysterydip 4y ago

When has there ever been a "permanent acceleration" in revenue growth for any company? Or do I misunderstand what they're saying?

Retric 4y ago
It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

0xmohit 4y ago

Everybody used the same AI to write the memo.

nemo44x 4y ago

It’s just corporate speak.

Abecid 4y ago

Holy shit you're right

meijer 4y ago

Is this even true? I thought the monetary policy of the Fed (as a reaction to Covid) simply made investments cheaper.

octodog 4y ago
Both can be true. But maybe one sounds more sincere than the other.

gbil 4y ago

a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material

nibbleshifter 4y ago

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended Who predicted this? The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dan-robertson 4y ago
That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued. But my memory may be playing tricks on me.
- jryhjythtr 4y ago
  The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come). Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
    - jryhjythtr 4y ago
      >The US has given over $8B in aid That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid. >Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.

twawaaay 4y ago

I do not believe the statement. Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible. My take would be: * They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity. * They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs. * They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively. * They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Share value is down everywhere. Where would people move to for better compensation?
- purpleflame1257 4y ago
  A place with more TC in cash.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    More than Facebook?
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Does Netflix have 11,000 open positions?
- twawaaay 4y ago
  I am talking best employees. People who will find good job no matter what. People you need to keep because they are actually the ones who make the show going. You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested. So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.

pyb 4y ago

This layoff almost sounds like an opportunistic decision, rather than something that was planned long in advance.

refurb 4y ago

Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos. When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.

shafyy 4y ago

I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.

bombcar 4y ago
They thought it would be a paradigm shift and didn’t want to be caught out and dinosaured. For them that risk was much greater.
- shafyy 4y ago
  In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course). They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
grey-area 4y ago
They were willing for their new employees to take that risk.

pachico 4y ago

Someone used https://quillbot.com/ https://quillbot.com/ with that memo and replaced the company name. Job done!

0xmohit 4y ago
It seems to do an awful job. Input: "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." Results in: "When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  This reads like a grade schooler trying to plagiarize something with his first thesaurus. I am disappointed by AI every day.
  - sodality2 4y ago
    It's deterministic based off the same input, so it doesn't look like AI.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seydor 4y ago

the % of workers fired is also the same everywhere. As if a single nefarious overlord is running the Valley

rtanks 4y ago

Agree

geniium 4y ago

OpenAI rephrase

gz5 4y ago

Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different: + Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business. + On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue. + The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.

arbitrary_name 4y ago

The same HR/layoff consultants were used by both leadership teams, i believe.