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Patreon laying off 20% of staff
- KomoD 3mo agoI can never take such statements seriously.
- theamk 3mo agoIt is pretty serious for all those people who has been laid off.
- KomoD 3mo agoI'm not saying the situation isn't serious. I'm saying I can't take these performative fluff statements seriously. Going on and on about how good these people are and then how well the business is going, as they are firing them. "special, beautiful humans" "wonderful humans" "kind, ambitious, hard working, and mission-driven humans"
- spwa4 3mo agoWhat is it with companies doing mass-layoffs and stating no reasons whatsoever, in fact giving reasons why there's no need: > Second, Patreon’s core business is healthy and strong, and we’re going to be a rock for creators for decades to come. Hundreds of thousands of creators rely on Patreon for their livelihoods, businesses, ... > We’re reducing the size of our team by 20%, or ...
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoRead between the lines. "This thing ain't getting bigger so everyone we needed to get it here but don't need to keep it going has to go." Like a game studio laying half the team off once the product ships.
- tombert 3mo agoI think that they must teach in business school or something that you never, ever, EVER acknowledge or admit that things have ever or will ever go bad in your business. I’ve worked for startups that will show massive customer churn, tell us that this is “actually a good thing”, do massive layoffs the next week because of the churn, and even while talking about the layoffs say that they’re stronger than ever. I’ve been doing this long enough that I am mostly used to the gaslighting, and have just accepted that business people have neither the ability nor desire to ever be honest about anything.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago> say that they’re stronger than ever. Well let’s play out the alternative then: a CEO comes out and says everything is not ok and you’re laying off people because you are in dire straits. I admire the honesty, but what do you think happens next?
- coliveira 3mo agoA society that doesn't value honesty deserves to be deceived.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoThis assumes that it’s always a lie… The point is you’re supposed to say that it’s a hard time, but you’ve made the necessary changes and you’ll come out stronger (hopefully), because otherwise why would you have made them? I just don’t think causing a panic is the same thing as honesty. You don’t have to freak everybody out about the health of the company or completely lie about the state of things.
- tombert 3mo agoI just don’t feel like the faux optimism actually works for anyone who has worked in the corporate world long enough. I, along with a lot of people I know, have developed a certain amount of cynicism around the entire corporate world, and so when I hear this kind of corporate doublespeak and refusal to talk to me like an adult, it generally feels anywhere between “infantilizing” to “gaslightey”. This kind of language worked for well enough for me when I first started my career but now I never assume any significant level of honesty from anyone high-up enough at a company. I am not sure what the optimal way to run a business is, and I am not even 100% sure I care. “Making a business successful” doesn’t imply that I have to like how they do it. Maybe the only way to run a business is to always pretend every fucking thing is sunshine and rainbows, but I still think it’s very annoying. Instead of them being real with me, I have to decrypt a secret subtext and determine if I have to start updating my resume.
- josefresco 3mo ago> At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. I guess this is the "reason" but obviously they aren't elaborating. It's odd they picked "6 months" - what changed in "the market"?
- nozzlegear 3mo agoWhat market is Patreon even in – the "facilitating crowdfunding for anyone looking to create things" market? There's not much competition there and I can't imagine it's profoundly changed in the last 6 years, let alone months.
- smelendez 3mo agoSix years ago was a long time — summer 2020. Substack is a huge competitor that has grown dramatically in that time. Beehiiv is another competitor that just launched a bunch of new features. Porn and sexy content is now on Onlyfans, which was just becoming mainstream during the pandemic. More recently, some podcasts have started focusing on YouTube and may be less interested in the paid-elsewhere subscription model.
- morkalork 3mo agoDespite what they're saying, I'd guess it's the totally-not-a-recession that's happening and they foresee people cutting luxury expenses (ie patreon subs) and they're trying to get ahead of it.
- josefresco 3mo agoLocally at least, luxury services are booming. Patreon probably isn't a "luxury" in the traditional sense, but it's certainly a luxury for the lower/middle class. Agreed on the "totally-not-a-recession" reasoning - I'm just always curious which businesses are insulated from this type of economic headwind.
- stbenjam 3mo agoI assume it is legal reasons.
- anticensor 3mo agoPatreon is founder-led.
- stbenjam 2mo agoMy comment about legal reasons was legal reasons surrounding employee law suits from being laid off. At will employment in most US states allow you to state no reason, that's safer than offering any reason at all. A specific reason for a layoff can be litigated.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoYou usually do lay offs because finances aren't doing so good, so you do it to stop the bleeding. Especially if you're a publicly traded company this tells investors you're doing SOMETHING, but for private companies, it's really up to you when and how you do it. I imagine companies with a reasonable war chest that are private try to hold on as long as possible.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoGenerally you’re right damn dude 20% of their staff? They needed to stop the bleeding a long time ago clearly.
- datakan 3mo agoThis isn't true. You usually do layoffs when you anticipate financial won't be good in coming quarters. If you wait until they aren't good then you're too late and the damage is done. This is why layoffs happen so frequently during "good" quarters.
- morkalork 3mo agoIt's wild how there isn't officially a recession but many companies are acting like there is
- datakan 3mo agoRecession isn't the driving factor. Many companies will actually increase staffing during recession to "grow" out of it. My former company used to go on merger and acquisition sprees during deep recessions so they would be well positioned when it was over. People really need to look at this stuff more strategically. The knee jerk reactions are not productive.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- throw84499449 3mo ago> core business is healthy and strong Thst is valid reason to layoff people. If there is no mess to clean, you do not need that many cleaners.
- re-thc 3mo ago> stating no reasons whatsoever It does under reason for reduction, quoting: At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. > giving reasons why there's no need... Patreon’s core business is healthy and strong Actually that's the reason. It says Patreon's core business is strong i.e. everything else isn't? You don't state the obvious unless there's a gotcha.
- bflesch 3mo agoDepends on jurisdiction, in many European countries a company with more than 300 employees can't do these kind of layoffs without giving a concrete reason, and if they do they need to close down a whole office location (e.g. we're closing our LA office, only SF office remains).
- powerpcmac 3mo agoThe rich get richer and the poor get more AI edited and toned condolence posting.
- ActionHank 3mo agoThat close out is brutal, "to our teammates who are leaving". Real "Oh no! So sorry to see you go totally by your own choice" vibes. The business is "solid", but is it not profitable? Who is cashing in on cutting these jobs? Which exec is losing their job for overhiring?
- ToucanLoucan 3mo agoAnd why not fire that exec who doubtlessly costs the company far more money while adding substantially less value than any of these employees? If a company is genuinely losing money and needs to boost it's profitability surely the easiest place to cut costs is the top where the lowest ROI positions are. Always goes back to that story from Nintendo when the Wii U went pear-shaped on release, Satoru Iwata and many other executives all took substantial pay cuts to keep the company healthy without demolishing their own ranks. Be nice to see an American company do that just one time, as a treat.
- pgwhalen 3mo agoAs someone not good at identifying this myself, what about this post indicates AI editing?
- powerpcmac 3mo agoIn the year of our Lord 2026 when you can be fired for not churning enough tokens, you can believe any corpo-post corpo speak has been checked by their LLMs for "compassionate voicing" and "low risk wording"
- ryandvm 3mo agoI still don't understand the economics of the full AI rollout. Who the hell is buying anything if more than 50% of the workforce is unemployed? And among the post-AI employable, every job that isn't highly skilled is going to have the wages pushed to the floor due to rampant unemployment. None of this shit works unless we figure out "Star Trek welfare"...
- password54321 3mo ago[flagged]
- KomoD 3mo agoWhat's your point?
- harladsinsteden 3mo agoAnd why exactly do you feel obligated to mention that? Do you have a problem with porn? Why?
- password54321 3mo agoYeah, let's just say if you take a closer inspection, some may or may not be ethical even for porn. Not exactly great for branding either.
- gosub100 3mo agoIt's taking a play from organized religion: control access to sex and you control the population
- worthless-trash 3mo agoI see an obvious link, the last 6 months a few countries have required age verification and certain credit cards can't be used for pornographic purposes.
- cybrox 3mo agoI don't know (I don't browse Patreon but just back some creators individually) but what would be the issue about that? Patreon is a content distributor and payment router between fans and creators, I don't expect or want them to police what creators do with that service.
- KomoD 3mo ago> I don't expect or want them to police what creators do with that service. Well, they do actually. They have a lot of restrictions on what 18+ content you can publish. Like you can't publish "real" porn, or that's how I interpret this at least: > Works depicting sexual activity between real, adult participants are not permitted. https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines#adult-works https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines#adult-works
- travisgriggs 3mo agoI’m selling Enshitification Popcorn. It comes with extra strong spices so that you can watch and eat your popcorn without the odors getting to you. Please support my efforts through my Patreon account! /s
- apical_dendrite 3mo agoThere are so many contradictions in this statement that either the person who wrote it is completely muddle-headed, or just a bad liar. > Nothing about our core business has changed – it remains strong and consistent a few paragraphs later > But our transformation is going to take time and the next paragraph > At the same time, the market in which we operate has undergone profound change over the last 6 months. We need to adjust our cost structure So is the business strong and consistent, or is it facing a rapidly-changing market, requiring that the business transform and adjust it's cost structure? > To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans. A few paragraphs later > AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize. So do you think AI doesn't replace humans, or do you think that you'll need fewer humans because AI will be doing more of the work?
- thomasmarcelis 3mo agoIf we throw all the arguments at the wall, one must stick right?
- newswasboring 3mo agoI think it's a bit more sinister. If they write everything they can claim later they "considered" it.
- ryandrake 3mo agoAI prompt: “Write a melodramatic layoff announcement that blames our problems on vague market/economic changes, suggests we need to transform, yet reassures investors that business fundamentals are strong.”
- smeeth 3mo agoNothing in there contradicts. A business that works well today may not work well tomorrow; it's management's job to change the business to better meet future conditions. > or do you think that you'll need fewer humans because AI will be doing more of the work? My bet is this one. To be fair, it isn't exactly an unpopular opinion. If I were starting a business today I'd plan to hire far fewer programmers than I would have just 2-3 years ago.
- officialchicken 3mo agoBottom line: How do these layoffs increase the successful outcome of product launches on the platform in any way?
- spacebanana7 3mo agoThe negative metric is more important - if you can cut staff costs by 20% with only 5% reduction in revenue/innovation that’s a win from an investor’s perspective.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoNot really. Investors want profits yes, but value is based on largely on expectations of growth. Declining revenue is not a sign of a healthy, valuable company.
- john_strinlai 3mo agoi think the goal is to increase profit by reducing operating expenses, not to increase the successful outcome of product launches.
- ricardobayes 3mo agoIn my subjective opinion, they don't. Layoffs almost always cause an atmosphere where taking risks is disincentivized.
- fourseventy 3mo agoWell if the company goes out of business because its not making enough profit then all product launches will cease.
- cootsnuck 3mo agoSaying that would be a much more reasonable layoff announcement. "Shit is good. But not that good. If we don't change course now, things may be less than good." If that's what they actually believe, they could just say it. They don't because optics are more important than honesty. Can't spook would be investors. Must control the market's narrative about the viability and growth-trajectory of your company at all times. It's tiring.
- natbennett 3mo agoPatreon just does this every few years. At least Jack Conte didn’t post a video of himself crying about it this time.
- ryandrake 3mo agoKind of tone deaf of him to post a somber layoff message below his open-mouth laugh-smiling profile picture.
- jadar 3mo agoLol imagine if he had changed his profile pic just for this. I don't think that would make him look any better.
- Barbing 3mo agoIt was small enough I didn’t mind. The page-blocking newsletter modal wasn’t disabled - boo.
- arm32 3mo agoHis smile really says, "I'm so happy, healthy and am quite fond of my life while making music with my really cool celebrity friends!"
- arm32 3mo agoFor anyone wondering, I looked it up and even managed not to mindlessly delegate it to an LLM—you're welcome! First layoff was in 2022, 17%, claimed reason: economic downturn. That was the last layoff. So by "every few years" you mean, a single time a few years ago, yea. Buckle in, our economy is flushing!
- jcfrei 3mo agoUpvoting this so more people see how cringey it's written.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoI'm the opposite - I wish people wrote like this more often. Basic humanity needs to make a comeback before we all kill each other. With the enormous caveat that this writing is honest, and I imagine you are implicitly including "it's not honest" in your grievance, which is a totally reasonable guess. We rightly assume CEOs are usually not honest when it comes to sympathizing with employees.
- cmiles8 3mo agoHonestly the most interesting thing to me here is that to took nearly 500 people to run Patreon.
- bflesch 3mo agoTo me it's always mindblowing how the headcount of a startup can massively increase and the company still be considered a "success story".
- Ekaros 3mo agoMake me always question what is going on in these companies. They are essentially a middle man reoffering payment providers services. Host some content. Lot of time just links to external platforms. There is some marketing but not really that much. They really should be running sustainable service for like tenth of that many employees... If even that. Most of the people don't care about them just the creators on their platform and less cut they take better for patrons or patronees.
- ryandrake 3mo agoI never understand these replies. Has nobody ever worked for a medium sized, yet global-reach company? I think a lot of HN has a very narrow view of how many different roles are required to run a company bigger than a local diner. Feels like a weird confirmation bias where “I only see a dozen engineers around me every day, therefore companies only need engineers to function.”
- ricardobayes 3mo agoWhatsapp had 55 employees until the buyout (of reported 19B).
- consumer451 3mo agoAnd how much money did they make and distribute at that time? My point is that pure tech-plays are relatively easy as far as headcount, right?
- tamimio 3mo ago>it was a hard decision It wasn’t, I bet executives were laughing reading that
- xnx 3mo agoGetting rid of headcount was probably an easy choice, but picking how many and who stays can still be hard.
- goatking 3mo agoI am pretty sure they opened their excel sheet, ordered the employees by salary, and got rid of the highest paid 10% of each department. Or the lowest performing 10% based on a score in the excel. They are just numbers to them
- sokoloff 3mo ago> A $1,500 stipend to replace your company laptop. It seems like a wild choice to give a specific figure as additional cash rather than just letting them keep their (wiped) laptop. That additional cash will be taxed (as should a laptop that is left with the ex-employee, but the used laptop can be valued and taxed as a used laptop rather than a $1500 cash payment [and frankly would often be, um, overlooked...). It seems like it's better for Patreon (cheaper, less IT labor) and approximately as good for the ex-employee to make this be in the shape of the used laptop than a $1500 payment.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- popinman322 3mo agoWith RAM prices how they are right now the used laptops might be more valuable than $1500.
- Shalomboy 3mo agoI mean, I wouldn't want to have to bulk-purchase a large number of well-spec'ed laptops in this market. But you aren't wrong.
- Hamuko 3mo agoWhat are you bulk purchasing them for?
- smelendez 3mo agoThis seems more like a bounty for the laptop potentially full of company information, passwords, code, secrets, etc., which Patreon does not want out in the wild or to have to deploy lawyers to demand back. The carrot, rather than the stick.
- stackskipton 3mo agoI would assume they are company managed Macs so they could just order a remote wipe and then remove them from iCloud so they revert to their out of box setup.
- bflesch 3mo agoI don't understand why this is problematic for some: They lay off 93 people so the total # employees before layoffs is 465 and it will be 372 employees remaining after layoffs. In same post they state there are 300k creators making money on their platform, so the ratio of employees to creators is 1:645 before layoffs and 1:800 after layoffs. It's a mature business and VC funding has significantly dried up for these kind of middlemen business models. Why wouldn't 372 people having thousands of meetings between them per week be enough to run such a company? Edit: If you downvote this without explanation I'd wager you never ran a company.
- add-sub-mul-div 3mo agoThe one time I ever paid for access to a creator on there, within the first month I got banned for being a bot (I'm not) and their customer service wouldn't help me. So my money was essentially stolen. Maybe all of these companies maximizing their automation so they can minimize headcount isn't a good thing for world.
- fourseventy 3mo agoI watched this dudes youtube channel where he makes music for years before I ever knew he was the CEO of pateron. It was a bit of a wtf moment when I found out.
- alexpotato 3mo agoHe's playing the piano in this video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiShsfvbFUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiShsfvbFUA
- recursive 3mo agoDecent keyboard player too
- itbeho 3mo agoAppears to be a full time musician and a part time CEO.
- justacrow 3mo agoThat they should be so lucky to have such a present CEO! Why ours sits on the board of multiple companies in unrelated industries, and manages some entirely unrelated business side of another conglomerate all by himself. Thankfully he's been promised several 10s to 100s of millions of dollars to make our company better now
- jonasmst 3mo agoWow, I follow his band on Instagram. Had no idea he was the CEO of patreon.
- codegeek 3mo agoThe only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences. Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People would prefer honesty. Just say "We need to increase our profits or reduce costs or both and hence we have to lay people off. Here is what we are providing as a severance". That's it.
- jadar 3mo agoI tend to agree. But the devil's advocate in me says that then they'd be accused of not having empathy. That sort of thing might work in Europe — but for a US company, I think you have to pay some lip service to emotions.
- codegeek 3mo ago"Not having empathy" may have made sense 20-30 years ago when mass layoffs weren't as common as nowadays. Nowadays, everyone knows how it works and how much they really care about the employees. Nothing is worse than someone faking empathy especially CEOs (and I am a small time founder/ceo myself even though of an extremely small company).
- jadar 3mo agoCompletely agree. That doesn't change the fact that people are fickle and want to have their cake even as they're eating it.
- lotsofpulp 3mo ago20 to 30 years ago was 1996 to 2006. Layoffs were very common, due to outsourcing to cheaper countries. It was common knowledge in my college years of the early 2000s to not expect a long tenure at any employer, and to always be applying to new positions.
- 3mo ago
- Shalomboy 3mo agoHow could Chapo do this? /s
- trentor 3mo agoNo matter what, people who write articles about layoffs like this go straight onto my 'people to stay far away from' list. He is on it since the crying video of the last round of layoffs.
- arm32 3mo agoI'd prefer a crying video over the obviously Claude-written article.
- colechristensen 3mo ago>Creators are earning billions of dollars each year on Patreon, and those earnings have continued to exhibit steady, strong growth. >Creators, members, revenue, and processing volume continue to show strong, consistent growth every month. lol strong consistent growth -> 20% layoff
- hajile 3mo agoHe sees what is coming. Crowd funding HAS to be dropping off as people choose between feeding their family or their favorite content creators (the creator will be fine as they have lots of other patrons is a guilt-free rationalization too).
- chrisss395 3mo agoI see others mentioning the severance package being decent for a US company. I'm glad they received something, but I'm sorry, can we stop calling this decent? It's markedly lopsided when a company can one day decide to lay off a large portion of their workforce and think 4 months is anywhere near acceptable. The average time to find a new job is significantly longer, especially depending on role and seniority. I'm tired of seeing American workers bear the brunt of the stupidity of the executive teams that have done their job so poorly as to suddenly need to lay off workers. If you are a leader and you are put in this situation, it is because you are a terrible at your job. It's not the market, it's not AI or some unforeseen disaster...it's because you had your head up your ass instead of actively running the business.
- IshKebab 3mo ago> The average time to find a new job is significantly longer Is that really true? https://standout-cv.com/stats/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-a-job https://standout-cv.com/stats/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-a... They found 3.8 months which sounds realistic. I can't imagine the average being significantly longer (like 6+ months?).
- tayo42 3mo agoIt says senior engineer almost 8 months right in that article
- IshKebab 3mo agoOk cool, but he just said the average. Not the average for senior engineers.
- forlorn_mammoth 3mo agoFrom the article > Graduates take an average of 5.6 months to land a job in the UK. This is almost 2 months longer than the national average also noting the average includes, at the fast end, > Job Average time to get a job (months) > Bar staff 1 > Sales assistant (retail) 1 > Waiter/waitress 1.2 > Delivery driver 1.2
- maxehmookau 3mo ago> First, the people who work at Patreon are special, beautiful humans, through and through. If you're calling me "special" and "beautiful" and removing my ability to pay my mortgage in the same sentence through no fault of my own, you can absolutely get in the bin. Fundamentally weird behaviour.
- Barbing 3mo agoYou could divorce a special and beautiful partner, and be making the right decision. A business decision that wrecks your life does not necessarily speak to any faults of your own. “It's not personal Sonny. It's strictly business!” The CEO probably believes it, which would make the difference to me. I think I would skim that line but perhaps it would have a subconscious benefit. Feels more human than weird to me.
- maxehmookau 3mo agoWe'll agree to disagree on that one. Feels more like a CEO trying to absolve himself of the human cost of a strictly business decision. Instead, he should own that business decision openly. Being told I'm "special" and "beautiful" by my boss feels strange enough, but to have it paired with my termination? The dissonance is too much.
- Barbing 3mo agoHave we ever had a boss like that? It’d be weird if a boss were super rude to me but for those who worked for Steve Jobs, it would’ve tracked. Maybe still have to agree to disagree!
- jackb4040 3mo agoMy favorite part was when he clarified whether it is/isn't AI replacing jobs
- Gareth321 3mo agoThey have 465 employees? That seems like a lot for what Patreon is.
- natbennett 3mo agoThey provide a lot of services and support to their bigger creators. Last I heard they also do their own payment processing, which is a substantial technical problem.
- darknavi 3mo agoWell, they _had_ 465 employees...
- anticensor 3mo agoYeah, they are not Discord, Gumroad, OnlyFans or Fansly.
- driverdan 3mo agoWhy does someone always say this about a tech company when they have layoffs, regardless of company size? 465 employees is not that large. Patreon handles millions of transactions. They need support, sales, engineers, etc. If anything I'm surprised they're not well over 1000.
- docjay 3mo agoAhh, but do you think it’s not large because other companies you’re familiar with are even larger, or because you can actually imagine breaking the necessary tasks into 465 parallel 40+ hour weeks? I struggle to make sense of the employee counts at large companies too, and I own a small business and have started or managed several others in various industries. It really seems like it’s a circular employment scheme of sorts. On Monday JackPak releases version 2.0.31, which fixed nothing but now the blue is red and doit(task) has been deprecated and replaced by do_it(task). Incessant “new version = yass” mentality provides pay justifications on Monday to install it. Oops, do_it() is a performance regression and check_it() doesn’t work with JackPackER 1.98.03 - that’s critical stuff - so the support team justifies pay on Tuesday while engineers justify the rest of the week putting out fires. Designers scramble to “take advantage” of the new display_text(), which displays the same text as before, but with a method that isn’t supported by client programs older than a year, so a slice of traffic goes away. Someone is paid to report the dip in sales due to reduced traffic while someone else is paid to pump it back up. Had to build 20 new servers to handle the do_it() regression; someone wake up the NOC. Entire buildings were kept busy, the service runs slower on supported client systems due to 100 new dependencies (they’ll want to upgrade soon, but will be forced to with the next version bump anyway), and the only discernible change is that the logon button has double the white space around it. Someone should change that so it has rounded corners, then make it triangular, transparent, retro-square again, put it in the hamburger, make it blue, 18 megabyte PNG, someone wake up NOC. On Monday JohnnyPak releases version 3.0.34.
- noir_lord 3mo agoHis gurning profile image with that post is certainly quite the juxtaposition.
- seany 3mo agoHaven't thought about patreon since they got political years ago and I canceled all my subscriptions.
- GlibMonkeyDeath 3mo agoJust going to lay this here: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2016/06/13/profit-ibm https://www.marketplace.org/story/2016/06/13/profit-ibm IBM went seven decades without layoffs. Yes, part of that was the unique situation of post WWII America. But read TJ Watson Jr.'s words - they really took seriously the fact that they weren't just a business - they had a responsibility to people who worked for them. IBM went through a LOT of transformation in those seven decades BTW - they somehow found ways to re-deploy people in their growing business each time. The words of this CEO are about as good as they can be under the circumstances, but all the happy talk about "special, beautiful humans" and "Patreon’s core business is healthy and strong" and "we’re not changing our roadmap or priorities" are obviously self-contradictory. Of course, if your business can't survive with its current headcount, it would be foolish to run it into the ground - then everyone loses. But this doesn't appear to be the case here. He took a long time to get to the punch line: "AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize." So, there it is, finally. Management realized we can do the exact same thing with 20% fewer (more productive) employees. That means the shareholders (including the CEO and the remaining employees), will have a more valuable company. Sorry, we couldn't share this with the 20% we let go, who helped build the company to this point, and we can't even wait for our business to grow into our headcount, which if everything is so rosy, should be a matter of months. So good luck with the "my journey has come to an end, I am so grateful [to have been fired]..." LinkedIn posts!
- keiferski 3mo agoI think this is an uncharitable take, and judging by these comments, a pretty common one today on HN – probably because there are less and less founders posting here, and more bitter employees. Patreon isn't IBM, it's not even Google or Amazon. IBM was above even FAANG in its day, it was practically an extension of the US government for decades. Patreon is in the media/content business. It is perfectly reasonable to think that they have to rethink their company structure with AI completely destroying/changing the way their industry works.
- buellerbueller 3mo ago
- motbus3 3mo agoapart from the fact they are trying to make it in the most possible human way, it feels like they did not need to do it, or at least not at this scale at this moment. everything feels kinda weird in this letter.
- eluusive 3mo agoI migrated off Patreon awhile back. It's extremely clunky, and the service charge is pretty high comparatively.
- john_strinlai 3mo agocomparatively high compared to what alternative? are you getting the same support/services/exposure/etc. on whichever platform you moved to?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- running101 3mo agoSeems like it was AI but not AI ;)
- meristohm 3mo agoI would be more inclined to give to people via Patreon if there was a way to set a desired income amount and a transparent "overflow pipeline" for what happens with any extra money.
- gotohell123 3mo ago[dead]
- gotohell123 3mo ago[dead]