What do you mean by an "adverse environment over the next 2-4 years"? Please be more explicit.
Big picture: Donald J Trump, and the potential to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody. Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.
In either case, reducing your burn rate by $10M per year is a smart move.
No matter how far you are in the SV bubble, even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.
> Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.
Sounds like a great thing to me.
Big picture, Trump, and a Trump presidency, are a huge unknown. It's probably a matter of personal projection what you think the outcome will be, but it can hardly be dismissed out of hand.
For example, do you think Trump, a hotel owner, will support legislation that favours AirBnB? It's not as if he is above petty payback on people he feels have wronged him.
And of course there's a more general effect on the economy. Maybe he'll be great! Maybe he won't. You might think that's a good thing but you can hardly blame employees of vulnerable startups who would rather not lose their jobs.
Is it really so far-fetched or useless to project that there will be far reaching macroeconomic effects if Trump successfully implements any number of his stated policies? Sure, if you want to be optimistic you can hope the effects will be net positive, but that hope is at least as speculative as predicting that "winter is coming", so all we're left with is a high level of medium term uncertainty. Given that, it seems pretty strategically reasonable for a company (especially an over-leveraged one struggling to beat their VC clock) to reduce their risk exposure "because Trump".
The point I was making about Trump is this huge fucking black swan just landed, and everybody with money is snapping their wallets shut, and the rest of us can just go fuck ourselves and drop dead.
Just watch, many of you are next.
Ergo, there will be more people with more money to invest. Maybe they all decide that they hate software, but I'm not seeing it. The only thing that's "bad" is the strengthening US dollar, and that ordinary interest rates make a bank a reasonable place to put some money.
Sorry to pierce your echo chamber. And your "might be you next" threat? So tacky. As if the many startup software engineers here haven't been laid off before. And if anybody at Medium making/announcing this decision said it had something to do with Trump's election, I hope you've lost all respect for that clown.
It's because the economy has done so well under Obama that it can withstand Trump's nonsense, at least for the near term.
Yeah who does this ex-median think he is? It's not like he worked there.
Putting it all in perspective though, to the extent it's a negative risk for SV based companies it's also a positive risk for things to be "disrupted".
Everybody knows the current situation cannot last, and in fact much of financial industry does not want it to last (for good reason), and knows that the current system must be reformed.
Framing this as a "hurrr Trump's gonna to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody" makes you look very ignorant.
(I'm just explaining, not making any value judgements.)