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Block spent $68M on a company offsite in September 2025
- rwmj 7mo agohttps://xcancel.com/BullTheoryio/status/2027250361816486085 https://xcancel.com/BullTheoryio/status/2027250361816486085
- npilk 7mo agoJust because G&A was up $68m doesn't mean it was all spent on that one party... Edit: never mind, the report clarifies that without the party expense G&A would have been flat YoY.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 7mo ago... That's $7,000 per employee. I want to hear more about this party :D
- fhd2 7mo agoI got curious as well, because the craziest party poor me can imagine would clock in at maybe half that, including travel. All I could find: > The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe. So that'd make it 8.5k per person. Building stages, paying permits, hiring acts like these, I bet that's where it mostly went.
- bradleybuda 7mo agoDon't underestimate travel + hotels + airport transfers when you're paying corporate prices
- CyberDildonics 7mo agoA gift basket that includes fancy mixed nuts, some luxury soaps, a 96 core Epyc CPU, and a coupon book to local restaurants.
- Aurornis 7mo agoIt was an in-person event, so flights, lodging, and food could have easily consumed a lot of that. Running events is expensive when you have to fly your remote employees in and house them for multiple days.
- andersmurphy 7mo agoI'm curious how much they lost in the bitcoin crash.
- rwmj 7mo agoLost $234 million on that according to https://archive.ph/09kZr https://archive.ph/09kZr (link goes to FT.com)
- Scoundreller 7mo agoThat’s the mark-to-market change, no? Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall. Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done. From Wikipedia: > In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]
- rwmj 7mo agoYou have to compare it to what else they could have done with the money, such as investing in their own growth, or even giving it back to shareholders if they had no good ideas what to do with the money.
- Scoundreller 7mo agoI did! If they invested it in themselves it would have been a 50-75% loss, same with doing a buyback (return the cash to stockholders) at a high stock price. Dunno what better proxy I could use for how it would have went other than their actual stock price. Unless we are to think their next best idea that they didn’t invest in would have done better than all the other things they did invest in. But that’s very speculative. Instead they got a blended 300% gain on btc. Should have sold the entire company for cash and bought bitcoin at the timelines they did.
- aitforalll 7mo agolaying of 50% of your workforce is the obvious solution. next year the party will only be $34 million. repeat that 4 more times and you get down to just over $4 million.
- johnnyanmac 7mo agoKinda how it worked for my last full time job. Full on all-hands which flew all the remote workers in, and my lead made 2 guesses: "Either we've been acquired or the IP has been cancelled". I guess the sad part is that an acquisition wouldn't guarantee I wouldn't be laid off anyway.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoFood $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Party $68,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my company is dying
- wood_spirit 7mo agoOften embezzlement cases include crazy expenses. Just put in my mind by the grift and corruption posts that are currently trending on HN front page right now.
- kshacker 7mo agoI do not know about here, but back home in India, 68 M would be so juicy for someone in the organizing chain to not take a cut. People get fired all the time, but sometimes the gravy train can run for years before getting caught. No first hand experience ... just anecdotes and some news reports.
- atonse 7mo agohaha my brain went like... "ok.. but was it a party for all 9,000 people?" "maybe they had great caterers" ... then I did the math. It's $7.5k per employee. Clearly I'm just not creative enough to know how to waste money like an SV company.
- the_mar 7mo agoit included flights, hotels, food and travel expenses for 9000 for multiple days, as well as the "party". US-based travel for 1 person for 5 days is easily 4K, on top of that some people were probably international so it would be higher, and on top of that there are the "party" expenses like venue and catering which probably wasn't that significant.
- anon7000 7mo agoWell, the layoff post explicitly said that the company’s financial health was good.
- happyopossum 7mo agoYou can call it a 'party' if you want, but a company-wide in-person event is a) valuable, and b) expensive. Calling an all-hands a party without any supporting evidence feels willfully negligent.
- baq 7mo ago$68M/10000 employees = $6800/1 employee A lot? Not a lot? Don’t know anymore.
- layer8 7mo agoAt the cited $340000 salary, it amounts to around the same as one extra week of vacation for everyone.
- dangoor 7mo agoSeems plausible. Travel (some international), hotels, taxis, venues, food, and entertainment. It adds up. Probably not a single day event.
- Scoundreller 7mo agoIf you account the employee wages into it, then it really adds up.
- mmcclure 7mo agoIt's on the high side, but...honestly not absurd? "Party" implies one night rager, but the source says "in-person company event." That seems more like a multi-day company onsite to me, and the total bill per person there probably includes travel, accommodations, food on top of any overall event costs. Bringing a remote employee to SF just to work out of an office for a few days can easily cost a few grand.
- kermatt 7mo ago$6,800 per person is absolutely absurd. If the event lasted an entire month, that's still $225 per person per day.
- an0malous 7mo agothat's where the innovation happens
- ricardobeat 7mo agoBlock had more than 4000 employees? Rarely hear of it.
- throw03172019 7mo agoThere is a big difference between a single party and a company wide offsite. Those can get quite expensive (airfare, hotels, food, etc) Side note: I have no idea what Block does and why they need 10,000 employees anyway.
- mattmaroon 7mo agoHe said very specifically that the layoffs weren’t for financial reasons, and they are publicly traded company so you can just look at the reports. Anyone who thinks this wasn’t because of AI has a level of optimism I’ll never achieve.
- jollyllama 7mo agoCynicism can be optimism when the prevailing narrative is doom and gloom. How is the competing narrative of cutting teams that were working on non-core or experimental projects falsified by any of this? Why wouldn't they put a brave face on that and chalk it up to AI? You can see how the stock market has rewarded it.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoOne key piece of financial information in those reports is that that their revenue growth fell off a cliff when ZIRP ended (months before ChatGPT came out) and never recovered to even pre-Covid levels. There's no indication that their core business is unhealthy, and I'm not claiming to rule out that AI is related, but it makes sense that a company transitioning to "maintenance mode" might find itself wanting to be a lot smaller.
- Aurornis 7mo agoThe $68M number comes from a statement that says their General and Administrative expenses were up year over year and the growth was primarily driven by an in-person company event. The Tweet extrapolates to assume that the entire difference was due to the event and calls it a "party" Even if we assume 100% of the increase was due to the event, that's about $6800 per employee, or about a week or two of pay for developers. This includes flights, lodging, and food for remote employees. That adds up fast. This is just Twitter ragebait.
- Hamuko 7mo ago>"General and administrative expenses were up 14% year over year on a GAAP basis, driven in part by an in-person company event. Excluding this expense, general and administrative expenses remained roughly flat year over year in the third quarter."
- Aurornis 7mo ago> roughly I did the other math assuming it was 100% for the in-person event anyway.
- hmokiguess 7mo agoMaybe that was the selection process, those that were less fun and didn’t engage into the AI water coolers are now packing their belongings
- BonoboIO 7mo agoTravel and Entertainment
- danans 7mo agoI think this is missing the forest for the trees. With 4000 fewer employees, they could have a $136M meetup party and still be ahead by hundreds of millions, assuming they can sustain or increase revenue. That's the big bet software companies are making right now.
- mikeevans 7mo agoDescribing it as a “party” feels misleading. It was a company-wide offsite for an essentially fully remote organization. Was it necessary? Probably not. But I found the in-person time valuable, especially with teammates I’d never met face to face. Source: I was there
- upmind 7mo agoHow did they manage to spend 68M on it? Genuinely asking or is the number not accurate as it is clumped together with other stuff?
- mikeevans 7mo agoI don't know what event planning costs but running an event for ~10k people that includes flights, hotels, food, event space, etc. is expensive I guess.
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- mizzao 7mo agoAt $6.8k/head, that's inefficient (a startup wouldn't spend like that) but not egregious if it was for e.g. a weeklong event or something.
- thesurlydev 7mo agoLike any good company off-site. Strippers and steaks
- darth_avocado 7mo agoAnd was the in person time more valuable than not having those people you met in your team moving forward?
- etc-hosts 7mo agolast Block/Square party I went to had MC Hammer as a DJ.
- ralferoo 7mo agoI sincerely hope the event branding played on calling it a "Block Party". But anyway, as others have said, the tweet seems outrageous at first, but at $6800 per employee for a multi-day offsite, with hotels, travel, etc included, it doesn't seem excessive. I'm sure their salary for that month was significantly higher.
- ta9000 7mo agoIn the scope of Jack’s mismanagement, this seems minor. See: $29 billion for a BNPL company.
- yieldcrv 7mo agoWait till you find out the “party budget per employee” at the company you work for