Patreon: Some Tough News to Share

It's stilted startup SF hipsterspeak: mission-statement newspeak synergy 2.0. Different BS, same results - fake af.

I think his nonverbals gave him away. If he were a more-convincing, greedy sociopath, I might believe more of it.

I'll broach the annoying expectations of toxic positivity for ya:

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The problem is that he's essentially using this news as self promotion to build his channel. He's probably getting ad revenue for that, and if he's not, youtube is. That's pretty messed up.

"Do you have any idea the amount of effort it takes to train 36 people?"

It takes a long time for new people to have a real understanding of the current system, the tradeoff decisions and culture that led to the current system. And it takes a long time for new people to learn how to work effectively together. I'd think bringing in new leadership and product vision first, and having the existing team be given the go ahead to work towards those new goals should be the first step, only doing large scale replacements if they don't deliver.

Loads of people will point to the Spolsky "iterate, don't start from scratch" story about netscape. Replacing large parts of your engineering team vs just improving the team you have seems like the same "mistake". Also not sure how they have such a large team in the first place, but that may be part of the root reason. I don't just mean large engineering team - google is showing ~200 employees altogether, which just seems like a lot, but many of those might be CSR positions?

But I suspect this is all to do with bringing in much cheaper people.

So upending the lives of 36 dedicated employees is the best alternative? People can't raise money like a corporation can. Those people got the company to where they are today, so suddenly it's fine to just cut them loose because you made a video about how you feel about the situation?

> Do you have any idea the amount of effort it takes to train 36 people?

Two weeks?

Certainly less time than it'll take to restaff and onboard their replacements.

It's a website. Web stacks are mayflys. Pivoting to today's new hotness is part of the gig.

A senior dev could get into a new stack reliably within ~3 months. And it doesnt 'take' effort to train them - they just do it themselves. And the cost of loss of people who know the existing product, business model, existing codebase is WAY too great than a few months' pay. That's something that comes only by having people on board for long duration and having them accumulate experience of the existing product and business model.

Most people from MBA background has little understanding of this. They tend to see engineers as replaceable - you just bring in someone who knows a new stack while passing to that new stack and youre done (the best case scenario).

It doesnt work like that.

When you lose experienced engineers who know the product and the codebase in a fast moving startup, you lose people who you need to ask stuff when you need to do something new. Especially when the codebase lacks sufficient documentation (common in startups). Then the newcomers have to learn the codebase all over again - a gigantic hit to productivity.

This is why people from non-engineering background should not make engineering hiring/firing decisions.

This video doesn't seem to be monetized. Refreshing multiple times doesn't give me any ads.

This is not the only San Francisco CEO that I've seen follow this playbook almost word for word. Even using the same phraseology.. e.g. "I blame myself. It's my fault we had to do this", a bit about how "We're shifting the way we build products" so we can "Help creators grow their business", and "The $company will be stronger for this decision".

I am a bit burnt out when it comes to the industry at the moment and perhaps jaded, but my guess is these CEOs have outsourced their apology to the same local reputation-management consultants, and that's why they all sound identical. If the leadership really cared about employees they would write the apology themselves, have some backbone and admit they terminated people due to cost cutting or performance reasons. Offer severance privately and move on. The rest of this is theater.

Their api is not being sunset. A lot of large sites/creators and major web entities as partners are using it.

It was an immediate firing. Early Monday morning, a previously-unscheduled fifteen minute "all-hands" zoom meeting appeared on everyone's calendars for 10 AM. Jack started with an abbreviated version of the "Some Tough News to Share" speech you saw at the link above, before he handed off to the new CPO who started in January, who explained that in order for the company to move forward following massive growth, profitable quarter, a juicy funding round, and despite Jack's insistence to his employees in prior all-hands meetings, "you did this; you are responsible for Patreon's success," that the 36 people being laid off were "not the right fit."

Employees were told that those who were being laid off would have their access suspended by the end of the meeting, while the remainder would regroup with a second meeting later in the morning. As soon as that was announced, people started posting goodbyes and non-work contact in slack channels, though not everyone could get off their missives before access was suspended.

Entire groups were eliminated in the "reorganization." This was not an individual-by-individual layoff. Many fine people were let go, including those who had made major positive impacts in the short time (some less than six months) they were there. There were some among the layoff who had been hired literally less than a month before.