Peloton fires over 2,800 employees, gives them a free 1-year subscription | Hacker News Reader

Peloton fires over 2,800 employees, gives them a free 1-year subscription

businessinsider.com

41 pointsterabytest16 comments

When people ask questions like “how can CEO compensation be so high for person X? There is no way they add that much value to the company”

What they forget is that even a CEO that adds little to no value over time, is phenomenally more positive for the baseline of a company than one who derails the entire company. And the fact of the matter is that it’s easy as a CEO to detail a company and 99.999% percent of people would likely do without ever thinking their actions or inaction was what caused it.

It can happen as innocently as just passively assuming that your CFO is fully capable of managing all the finances, or assuming everything is perfectly fine with your technology because “it’s just a simple thread mill” or by assuming that all media coverage is good media coverage so just ignoring how your brand is managed.

Now of cause everyone is thinking “I’d never do that if I was the CEO of a company”. But these are all the known examples you have in front of you, everyone things they be able to sail the titanic around the iceberg, even if they have no sailing experience at all, yet it wasn’t a random guy of the street who managed the ship when it happened. The important part is putting your attention on the right points. A CEO who is micromanaging the finances, the branding and the technology is also going to be a huge problem for a company. As a ship captain who spends 16hours staring after icebergs every day is also going to be ineffective. And there might be other potential bombs in other companies that need attention.

Point is that being a great CEO doesn’t always mean a 10X growth in value. Sometimes it even means just limiting a loss to 5% through a rough patch when most people would have let it go to 25% lost without, sometimes it means to not fumble the ball when life throws a huge opportunity your way. You know like selling personal exercise equipment when every fitness center closes down due to a global pandemic.

All that may be true.

But we don't pay people based on how much they make for the company. We pay them based on supply and demand.

And I believe the pool of people that can do the job of the big company CEO is way larger than the $100m plus pay packages would indicate.

Companies go with the high dollar rockstar CEOs for the same reason they select IBM or Oracle and pay up the nose for substandard results.

What a weird argument. So your saying that the compensation is entirely based on supply and demand. That’s a fair starting point for a position sure. But you are then claiming that compensation is too high given the supply and demand… so which is it? Is it supply and demand or isn’t it supply and demand?

> Companies go with the high dollar rockstar CEOs for the same reason they select IBM or Oracle and pay up the nose for substandard results.

I get that your just projecting annoyance. But you do understand that plenty of companies chose to go with oracle and Java and turn a huge profit without issue right? I mean sure you could argue that company X could have saved money if they chose Haskel and Postgres, but for some reason all the major stable companies didn’t bet the company on a gamble of saving a couple of bucks in the tech stack and it worked out fine for them. It’s a very IT centric view to believe that the most important decision a company makes is weather they chose one or another tech stack and that the most important point is the cost. Exactly the kind of narrow focus that would have a CEO derail a company and wondering why no one is joining the new “social media platform” or what have you, even though he’s using much better tech than the competitor who just chose oracle and then focused on the real important focus points for his company.

And it might be hard to believe, but in any given company you’lol likely find 999 out of 1000 people with similar clouded judgement and biased views that could potentially kill the company, and the. You have the 1 CEO making all the decisions that you clearly disagree with, who’s “just some overpaid rockstar” but still the company not only survives, it grows. That’s worth a lot to a board, who ultimately set the pay range they are willing to pay to have that person at the captains seat.

The CEO slides were absolutely brutal https://twitter.com/silviakillings/status/149104084965595955...

> Peloton is firing over 2,800 employees — 20% of its corporate workforce

Why does an exercise bike manufacturer employ ~14000 corporate people? Isn't that a bit much?

They've tried to expand beyond that original product, and they have kiosks in malls, which I assume are employees as well.

In before the subscription is opt-out required auto-renewal.

> With gyms re-opening as vaccine rates increased, Peloton's business took a huge hit: The company's market value has dropped from $50 billion last year to $9.8 billion as of early February 2022.

Did people not think that once covid is on the downswing people will exercise in gyms or go outdoors more? If we have such smart people going into finance why does this happen?

People are obsessed with short term gains. I reckon most people knew the stock was overvalued in the long term and simply wanted to get in and sell at a profit before it inevitably settled in to a proper value.

Who could’ve predicted that this might happen when the pandemic got under control? Just kidding, I’m sure many people predicted it (and made a lot of money).

CEO held a holiday party for talent/trainers while encouraging thrift/cutbacks for all other employees

At 40 a month that is not even $500 of value. Also… What if they don’t own a Peloton?

It does stop their subscriber numbers dropping by 2800 in Q1, regardless of whether the subscriptions are used or even paid for.

That's one way to boost subscription count.

> As part of the severance plan for the over 2,800 laid off employees, Pelton is offering a curious benefit: A membership to Peloton.

Is that it? There's nothing more in their severance? I wish the article would explain this more.

It does say _part_ of the severance is the membership, so there must be _something_ else.

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