AngelList lays off a number of staff and cuts executive salaries | Hacker News Reader

AngelList lays off a number of staff and cuts executive salaries

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149 pointspseudolus92 comments

The pandemic makes it easier to make layoffs you were considering otherwise. It gives both employers and employees cover by letting them point to big economic changes. I'm firing you because virus, not because I made a mistake when I created your department. I got fired because virus, not because I wasn't productive. It saves face all around, making jobs less sticky.

or when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked.

No, nobody was naked - the tide was just so strong that their swimsuits fell off.

I respectfully disagree.

On the other hand, my company has cut hours for the entire product/dev team by 20% (not sure what the consulting side is doing, I don't talk to them much) rather than make layoffs.

Makes me actually trust them when they say they have no intention to make anybody redundant if they can avoid it. They actually want to keep me employed if they can help it. The fact that I've turned up late 3 days a week for 2 years and never got written up for it attests to that too, I must be pretty good at coding I guess.

> turned up late 3 days a week for 2 years and never got written up for it attests to that too

I'm grateful I don't work at a company where you get written up for being late. Sounds like high school.

That's completely contextual to the actual position and responsibilities. Plenty of jobs require being on time.

Sounds like it’s not that important for this job.

If you’re late to standup 3 days a week, I’d consider that quite unprofessional.

Then standup is just a way to force employees to show up at an arbitrary early time.

I think I've never been in a project where standups were before 10 in the morning. At some point you have to decide if you're working in a team or not -- first people will leave the office around 16 so there's only a limited time window.

Nothing better when 9 people have to wait for or organize around one primadona that just take it as personal offence that coordination requires him to be somewhere at set time.

If you are regularly late to any meeting, it's problematic (assuming the meeting is worth having, of course). If I have a co-located team with good interaction that mostly works core hours, I actually don't want a standup meeting. Everything I would do at standup is easier to do by simply talking to the people I want to talk to. However, if you have a team where at least some people work remotely, or work different hours (either by habit or by time zone), then it is incredibly helpful to have a meeting where everyone can be together at the same time. People coming late to that meeting make it difficult to organise your day. If the meeting starts and you wait, it can be very disruptive. If you don't wait, then you don't get to talk to that team member -- who will often end up getting distanced from the rest of the team.

Having said that, many organisations have standup meetings that aren't worth the time they spend. However, I don't think you can say apriori that this is definitely the case.

> However, if you have a team where at least some people work remotely, or work different hours (either by habit or by time zone), then it is incredibly helpful to have a meeting where everyone can be together at the same time.

+1 to this. I work for an org that's on different coasts and, and different coasts in several countries. Synchronous and asynchronous communication is hard, and it's vital to have at least a 15 minute touchbase to make sure everyone is on the same page.

How many meetings are daily at 9am though?

Why does that matter? Being a professional means meeting your obligations. 9AM is perfectly reasonable.

I mean it's a useful meeting and therefor not arbitrary. If that's the game they have to play with us skeptically efficient types, I'm for it. I don't have a problem working, I have a problem doing BS for appearances sake.

It is also easier, California lifted WARN requirement, which required companies to give 60 day notice to employees when laying off a large number of them.

As another commenter has pointed out, AngelList’s recruiting/job hunting service is in poor shape.

I was headhunted and when I test-drove their app I actually considered the idea that they had feature-flagged my email address and were showing me a dysfunctional version to see how honest I would be in my assessment.

Using their recruiting tool is similarly confounding. It’s just such a PITA I know candidates are getting ignored via that channel at my current employer.

I've had a lot of success recruiting engineering talent on AngelList for years. It's actually my preferred channel for recruiting. I seem to get higher quality candidates and into interesting discussions faster than other platforms.

The very first time I got an email from AngelList saying "so and so is interested" a dark pattern in their UI got me to connect with them or whatever they call their conversion metric.

And my experience was downhill from there.

Now my attitude is: if you're interested, apply on our careers page.

Hm, lots of hate for AngelList here. Ive only used them once, but they were central to my last job hunt, and I thought they were pretty great. Being reached out to directly by serious founders or technical VPs/directors was infinitely better than wading through recruiters who have no understanding of the jobs they're hawking (or any other technical jobs, for that matter).

Its soo hard to comprehend that our economy is soo fragile. I understand, cashflows are tight in restaurant and tourism industry. But honestly, you shouldn't run a tech company, if you cannot burn through a quarter.

So true. We're going to find out which ones were transferring revenue to executive salaries, stock buybacks and dividends.

The other ones were moving it, changing that income and changing that profit, including the stock market.

In practice, we've never discovered an effective way money can't be spent. I could have set out a way to do an accounting experiment that gives us the best of outcomes. The fact that we are spending so much means if we look for a number of reasons, it could be a good one for us.

If the money is being invested, we also don't just invest that money, we need a new metric.

Laying people off isn't necessarily a sign of distress. It may also be aptly observing the marketplace (e.g. the article suggests the layoffs were mostly in recruiting roles), and taking preemptive action. There are many of us who think this recession is going to last a hell of a lot longer than a single quarter, and if we're going to make cuts, earlier the better.

"Management teams that cut expenses first are advantaged as it is an area under the curve problem. The earlier the cuts, the less deep they have to be and the better positioned the company is for the recovery. Bad management teams cut late and deep, which leads to them really suffering in the upturn." [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@gavin_baker/thoughts-on-navigating-a-bea...

I mean, I think that is a sign of fragility. If I carefully make sure my laptop is far from the edge of the table every time I put it down, it's a smart, rational, well-advised response to knowing just how fragile my laptop is.

The interesting point to me is that we have an economy which, when the going gets tough, can afford to employ some 75-85% of the people it ordinarily does, and that when we've been close to 0% unemployment, it's been because of unstable luck and not underlying robustness. It's somewhat surprising to me that we don't live in a time where we can comfortably afford to employ >>100% of the people in the system.

(Well, either that, or we do live in such a time but our economy doesn't know how to allocate resources in a way to make it work.)

Unless, the definition of fragility for a laptop is different than that of say a basketball. The former is expected to not be dropped, while the latter requires it.

I agree. I'd think that salaries could keep fluctuating up and down, like in the oil market, rather than the number of people employed in the economy as a whole. After all, better to make 60% of your earlier salary than zero, for most people.

I'd also think that a job may not be worth doing at a given salary but worth doing at a lower salary. Isn't hiring just an ROI decision, which should theoretically make sense at a lower salary?

This is easily pointed out, almost to the point where it's a lazy counter-point. In this case layoffs are a clear sign of distress and all those who have been laid off will have a hard time getting new jobs, which is something we should also feel bad about.

Cash flow is everything. That's lifeblood of every business. Only businesses with deep cash reserves will survive this: not many.

> But honestly, you shouldn't run a tech company, if you cannot burn through a quarter.

Everyone knows this pandemic is going to last WAY longer than a quarter. Probably a year+

18 months for a vaccine, and then another year to actually distribute it to everyone

Not true. Once the R is reduced below 1 (even to 0.99) the pandemic will disappear in weeks (an exponential reduction).

Why would it just disappear? There are reports of secondary waves of infection and long-term health impacts for those who managed to recover.

Also public health is separate from the economy which is on the edge of another great depression with 10M unemployment claims in the US alone.

Exponential decay is exponential growth in reverse, so for example, if the R were 2 during the growth phase, and the R is now 0.5, you would expect it to take the same amount of time to decrease as it did to build up.

If the R were reduced to 0.99 it would take years to go away. To give you an idea, after 10 rounds of people getting infected, spreading it onward, and recovering, the number of cases would only have decayed to around 90% of its peak value (0.99 ^ 10 = 0.904)

yup- just like Trump predicted- a Miracle!

Only a Miracle can save him!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXH69LabyPw

The pandemic might disappear in a few weeks. It will take far longer to fix the economic debacle.

The correct model is that of bacteria in a petri dish. As long as you have a few bacterium left, they can regrow. And as long as we're getting reports of a few cases in major cities or countries, those cities or countries will lock down. So it doesn't matter how many bacteria are left as much as how long it takes to get the last remainder eliminated.

I do expect the travel industry to be in shambles for at least a year if not several, which will effectively slow down every national economy and the global economy as well, thus practically guaranteeing a major multi-year recession on that basis alone.

> Everyone knows this pandemic is going to last WAY longer than a quarter. Probably a year+

It's not gonna last a year+ lol. Lately it seems that people of hackernews and r/coronavirus have an extreme overlap. Extremism is bad no matter which end you stick to.

How is it going to go away sooner?

> It's not gonna last a year+

Pandemic, probably not. Difficult (if not quite depressed) economy, probably.

The world will essentially be on lockdown until there is a vaccine. Not because its so deadly, its really not, but because its SO contagious, especially per-symptomatic. It only takes one or two people to cause another massive flare up, thats why it will be more than a year. Even if a vaccine is found tomorrow, we still need BILLIONS of doses, and thats after approval. This is going to be a long economic disaster. We havent even gotten to significant layoffs yet I feel, the next two months will get real bad across all industry.

It almost seems comical that the market has rallied heavily in the last two days. It's not to the levels of Feb 19th, but surely more value should be knocked off than where it currently sits.

The market has nothing to do with revenue or people keeping jobs though. Wait until we start seeing quarterly reports from companies. wait until companies that were setup to have a few months of bad sales start running low on reserves.

And yet you are projecting your own extremism as fact. Just admit that you have no idea when this will go away either.

Casually throwing around the term "lol" in an overly optimistic baseless projection of how long this pandemic is going to last IS extremism.

Are you literally "laughing out loud" about how quickly and painlessly you predict this is all going to be over? Or are you laughing at people who are taking it more seriously than you do? Really, what's so funny?

If you're going to be extreme, then at least be extremely CAREFUL instead of extremely FLIPPANT.

I don't see how the consequences of the pandemic aren't going to last a year, possibly much longer.

A significant percentage of people on this site have never seen a recession in their entire working lives. In their lived experience, the DJIA only goes up, and every single dip is a buying opportunity that reaches ATHs within a week or two. Hopping overpaid React/Angular jobs every 18 months for more pay is normal and risk-free, since the job market has never not been hot.

I've been them, in prior cycles. They know everything, and won't listen to anything but actual hard experience. An education is coming, but not from our comments.

If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense as a criticism of layoffs. You shouldn’t run a company with less than three months of salaries in the bank? Well okay, in that case if there’s a downturn and you only have four months of salaries in the bank, you need to lay people off to stay above that line. The result is the same, in a big downturn you may need to make layoffs.

The goal of a company is not to minimize the chances of a layoff. If layoffs can increase the company’s chance of survival, they might be a good strategy.

That's ridiculous. With that logic, if you're supposed to save X months of cash, then the very first cent you take out of that X months of cash savings, you already fucked up, b/c now you have less than X months of savings. Suppose you wanted to overcome this. So then you decide to start working a second job so you never have to touch the emergency savings. Then that defeats the entire point of the emergency savings, which is to be used when there is an emergency.

The company could also be said to be fucking itself over if it can't have enough cash to prevent layoffs of necessary employees. If it doesn't have enough cash at hand, it will need to lose talent and be forced to try to rehire when the economy rebounds. A competitor with a good savings account could instead leap past b/c they could simply dip into their savings and continue to build for the rebound, with all their engineers on board.

That's very similar to the argument about the capital buffer banks are required to have for the market downturn. Matt Levine wrote about it. It's turtles all the way down.

The whole point of you saving for 3 months is specifically to avoid the downturn scenario you described in your own post, so you obviously wouldn't have to lay people off because you specifically prepared for it by saving money.

The whole world sometimes feels like it's held together with duck tape. I think people invest in things until they're just barely not falling apart.

duct

Maybe that's the problem: using Duck Tape [TM] instead of Duct Tape.

https://www.duckbrand.com/

Layoffs sometimes signal an abrupt change in strategy rather than imminent collapse. For instance, if the business was on a sharp upward growth trend for years and hired aggressively to expand into a new market, but then that market disappeared over night and isn't expected to reappear for a few years, then it may be easy to see that the investment in this new segment might be better redirected into existing verticals. Doing so may require layoffs even if the immediate health and survival of the company is not at stake.

With all that said, there's no doubt many of these companies were uncomfortably on the edge of stability and success even in one of the strongest economic periods of modern US history.

What's interesting is that most VC startups have minimal to no cashflow. That's a completely different context from a typical business surviving on operational revenue.

I don't know if Angelist is still this way but it strikes me as odd to see so many pre-revenue startups claiming financial distress with million-dollar capital raises and no product/market fit or any business model.

Why is this strange? Expected future revenue would decline, no?

How can you expect anything without a product/market fit or tested business model?

Their costs should actually go down and runway extended because great talent is now cheap and available.

current round becomes last round b/c unlikeliness of hitting growth numbers. customers won't pay $0.80 for $1.0 when they have no job or their budget is frozen, and investors can't invest high multiples on growth when it isn't there. ("business is sound; we can switch to profitability whenever we want, we just prefer growth now" shown false, and investors don't want to look dumb when there are other fish in the sea or they can just wait).

ironically, for startups with discipline or strong fundamentals, this is bargain season for them + stronger investors. but most VC's are slowing dealflow b/c they're used to in-person and (it sounds like) are weak around their LPs or think like those in the first group, so not taking advantage of it.

How can you have funding if there's literally no expectation of future revenues? What you're describing is a high-variance expectation, not the absence of one. High variance distributions are still capable of having their mean lowered.

Plenty of companies have raised capital without a product or biz model. So sure, it's a non-zero expectation but not much more than that.

My point is that companies that are already well capitalized to go through the product/market discovery and build phase without any revenue shouldn't be claiming financial distress since nothing has really changed for them.

Going out and getting a loan from a bank or anything else is fine. That's what people do to invest.

There you go. There are some so-called 'tech companies' out there that focus on too much head count and sometimes hype around on Twitter or blogposts pretending to scale like Google or Facebook with 'products' that generate close to no revenue.

By the time they start frequently raising capital straight past their series D on a 6 month basis, you can tell their burn rate is too high which is an early red flag for layoffs and cost-cutting like this. I would not go to any company that isn't pandemic-proof which is the new theme of this recession.

Just take it slowly, ignore the engineering hype and focus on generating revenue with less capital with a quality product.

A pandemic is indefinitely shutting down most of the country. This is hardly evidence that the economy is "fragile".

That would be like calling your iPhone fragile if it breaks after throwing out the window of a skyscraper.

Can you guarantee that the whole madness will be over in a quarter?

While I agree that a sanely run business should have a nice chunk of liquidity on hand, what happens if analysts expect 6 months of shutdown and 12 months of recovery?

So if the cuts were mostly in recruiting, does that mean places link LinkedIn are in for lean times? Will being part of MS shield them from layoffs? Or do they diversified income now?

So, LinkedIn isn't solely recruiting, I see very significant use by sales people. And I'm in a position where I have directed purchasing for my company and essentially every salesperson I've worked with has connected with me on LinkedIn.

Oh yeah, things like sale navigator I think? But does that bring in much revenue compared to postings?

I'd (guess!) an order of magnitude more.

Why? Every AE at my company has Sales Navigator. One recruiter has the $10k/year Linkedin Recruiter package.

I worked at LinkedIn for a short time, their business Has multiple components. I believe they break out less post msft acquisition, but it’s reasonable to think of their business like this:

Recruitment help (hr services, hr recruiter memberships etc)

Marketing (ads on the site)

Sales services (sales people memberships)

LinkedIn learning (Lynda.com), but sold to companies as SaaS.

Other memberships

We know from their last 10k earnings that marketing was the largest growth +44%.

Every single one of their businesses has a lot of exposure to the macro and should see a significant hit. On the other hand, their penetration is still very low, both in terms of % of companies and globally and they don’t really have any competition on a number of their businesses.

If they decide to lay people off, it’s to upgrade their PnL.

linkedin is way too big for any sort of layoffs.

What? Big firms lay off people all the time.

It has nothing to do with being "big firm" - I didn't say that. I said Linkedin as a product is way too big, being pretty much a monopoly on work-social media and with that sort of power they aren't facing any layoffs because of a dip in economy.

You didn't say any of that in your original comment. Hence it's reasonable for your parent commenter to be confused, and reasonable for you to have explained what you meant.

If that were true (even within just tech) Cisco would never do layoffs.

Cisco doesn't have a monopoly product. Do you expect Facebook to lay off people that are working on Facebook.com too?

They very likely will reach a point someday where they will lay off a good number of people. They can't keep growing forever, and if they reach a point of stagnation, they'll get rid of some people to save on costs or to reallocate funds to grow a different division. Loads of big companies do this, monopoly or not.

Didn't know AngelList had a staff of more than 2

Is AngelList still active for seed investments?!

Especially for finding new potential investors outside the immediate network.

They've raised exactly a marathon worth (26.2mil) in VC.

Really hard for me to comprehend this when Naval is an omniscient oracle on Twitter.

Was this not fortold?

Naval isn't CEO any more

Is he really though? I feel like the tweets of his that grow the longest legs merely sound deep. I don’t get the hype.

I once read a critique of Twitter that went something like, "The more followers an account gets, the closer their tweets resemble fortune cookies."

Seems apt with Naval.

It's a lesson taught through hip hop. As demonstrated by one Mister Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi:

  All I do is try to make it simple

  The ones that make it complicated

  Never get congratulated

He's not, OP is being sarcastic.

Naval reads some books and repeats their ideas on Twitter without crediting the source. Those who've read all the same books know the real source and can see this clearly.

All: please let's not go into personal attack or celebrity gossip. Such things end up being a weird mirror image of the thing they're complaining about.

The worst case is arguments about Wolfram; I don't know how many nanowolframs a Naval thread would reach, and don't want to find out.

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