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Money was cheap to borrow and get from investors and now it isn’t.

Ah. It all makes sense now. It is cheaper for them to layoff with a decent 3 month severance than it is to pay high interest on the debt that is funding their salaries (interest rate will stay high > 1 year, going by Powell’s comments).

I am glad they did it transparently, but I wish they had been more open about this fact. Shifts the entire perspective IMO.

They are rolling back to February 2022 levels, after having grown a lot in 2020 and 2021.

If this is the only cut (big if), then I imagine that most areas outside of HR will not feel much different.

better for morale to go big once then chip away. With this cut, they can confidently say: "this will be the only one".

With 3x growth during the pandemic it seems that the layoff would be avoidable by reducing future growth factor. So what the letter doesn't say is that they layoff people to have better numbers to show to investors, not because it's not sustainable.