CEO Announcement to the Netlify Team | Hacker News Reader

CEO Announcement to the Netlify Team

netlify.com

67 pointsjoshmanders58 comments

Open articleView on HN

Wow this seems really poorly worded.

On one hand, the CEO is upbeat about the future and yaks on about strategy and in the same breath says "you're fired".

Seems very insensitive.

Laying people off isn't the time for a pep talk and ra ra rally on the strategy.

IMO if you have to lay people off then the focus should be the people being laid off, nothing else.

"Deeply sorry, we did our best to avoid this and we don't see any choice at this stage. All benefits have been paid immediately plus a severance package in line with statutory requirements. We have engaged a search firm to assist the people impacted with their job search.

We believe this is the right move to ensure stability in the current challenging economic conditions and I do not anticipate further layoffs.

I want to thank the impacted people for their service in building the company to this point."

Something like that anyway.

The wording is to reassure investors. They don't care about the employees.

Then that's supposed to go onto a private email addressed directly to the investors.

If you want to announce layoffs, do so with humility and lots of goodwill to the people that helped build your company, especially when you're announcing on your website for public scrutiny.

How? Don’t the investors have the actual numbers?

Some investors will look at numbers. Others will look at the persona. (See Tesla's technically unreasonable valuation)

Not everyone reads everything, a bunch of people will just follow the market.

Or it's for the HFT bots that run the press releases through sentiment analysis and make trades accordingly.

<span color=“white” size=“1”>Revenue is up 800%!</span>

Respectfully disagree. It's important to explain why, and he does that in a standard 3-point structure without getting too carried away on the hype train. It could be worse.

Also, this part is worth emphasizing:

> For those amazing Netlifolk that are leaving us today, our team is... waving [sic] the first year stock option cliff for newer employees, and extending the exercise period to 7 years.

This is a classy move. They didn't have to do this, but they did. Layoffs suck, and no amount of wordsmithing on the email is really going to make a huge difference. It's worth noting and encouraging when companies at least take the time to do something for the people they're letting go.

I fully agree with you on one thing, though: the word "sorry" is conspicuously missing. A little more ownership would go a long way.

It's interesting to see the continued waves of layoffs. I'm starting to hear from friends at startups that their companies are going through pretty significant layoffs. Makes sense since we're basically at the 1 year mark from when the VC money dried up.

I wonder how many companies had 12 to 18 months of runway left and we're about to see them slowly turn off the lights.

Such weirdly worded announcement. Reflecting into public about a private company announcement but also it’s “announcement to the Netlify team”? And three bold highlights for (who?) investors?

I guess the image for investors was built, what about the image for anyone considering joining Netlify at any time in future (probably not right now since they need to exercise their financial discipline).

What strikes me is that in 3 years they added extra management layers and made team slow and now instead of solving this they just let people go. What does this say about the top management?

Trying to address investors, customers maybe, and employees at the same time publicly seems like an inevitable terrible result.

I remember when CEOs addressed those groups separately. It just made more sense.

> Focus on Enterprise Architects and Marketers

What does this mean? Netlify is focusing on enterprise architects?

I switched off their platform and onto Cloudflare pages. It’s honestly so much better. Netlify seemed to just… stop.

> From 2020 to 2023 we grew our team substantially and added layers of management. We now need to simplify Netlify to be more nimble

While management layers certainly do add overhead to varying degrees, simply getting rid of it and trying to be move faster and be more nimble, in my experience, leads to one of two things:

1. The existing management layer work gets offloaded to multiple people who have no interest in those topics, usually without any extra pay for them as well.

2. The management layers get removed without any replacement, which usually leads to long-term overhead across all departments that's often hard to quantify.

Combined with the wish to expand and evolve, especially within the enterprise sector, neither of the above options is a good choice. The only thing such change is good for is cutting expenses in the short term to inflate company value on paper.

Weird times.

Netlify did so much very fast to encourage and help move a certain are of web dev into the Jamstack realm or at least promote the main tenets of it as it rapidly became a mainstream option. Now after all that, the mainstreaming/normalization, they're left where I do not know. Sadly, I don't think CEO Matt knows either, but trying to find a way, despite it being a rough road now.

I think the problem was their pricing and arbitrary limitations. Like 7 day audit log.. 7 day user metrics, up to 100 form submissions per month. That's their paid professional plan. Seems extremely hard sell when I tell customers they are limited to 100 form submissions.

It would have been better to offer a low monthly charge per website (and bundle in the features)

It’s worse than that. We love their core service, but every single non-core service is utterly mediocre.

You can’t even set a custom no reply email or create a custom template for their form service. Why would I pay $20/mo for that when I could pay a different SaaS like Sendgrid virtually the same and get better features for roughly the same amount of work?

You’re definitely right on some level about the pricing too. There’s nothing quite like whackamole downgrading sites monthly because they may or may not exceed the free tier that month.

There's something particularly gross about using cutesy terms like "Netlifolk" for your employees when you're firing them.

Fortunately they stopped short of "Today, some of our beloved Netlifolk will be Netlifired."

> From 2020 to 2023 we grew our team substantially and added layers of management. We now need to simplify Netlify to be more nimble,

Does this mean they got rid of directors and VPs? If not, this restructuring is meaningless. Without engineers, nothing is going to get built.

1 C-suite, 2 VP+, 4 director+ roles across eng, sales, marketing, HR impacted. Lots of staff-level ICs also.

Great!

From the title it sounded like Netlify had a new CEO.

Anyone have an idea of what percentage of the workforce affected? They already laid off 16% back in December. Since it's not mentioned in the blog post I fear it may be quite high.

46 people were affected.

Glassdoor reports Netlify as having 51-200 employees, so based on your 46 number this layoff affected anywhere between 23% and 90% of Netlify's employees. Pretty disturbing.

the info on glassdoor is not correct.

Well then, what is the correct number?

Closer to 300 according to LinkedIn.

In Dec '22 the company had 300 employees and laid off 48. I heard that they were down to 200 employees yesterday and laid off another 46.

Laid off 48 of that 200 bringing the new total to ~152 (so nearly 25%) or laid off 48 bringing the total down to 200 (~20%)?

Either way, pretty significant.

I was part of the first round in December where they laid off 48/300 or 16% I heard from a former colleague who was impacted by the latest round that they laid off 46 of roughly 200.

Thanks for the info. Hope things are going well for you now!

of course and thank you! in a much better place now!

From 2020 to 2023 we grew our team substantially and added layers of management. We now need to simplify Netlify

So who was responsible for the strategy now being overturned? Presumably they will be the first to go?

That's not how this works, in all likelyhood that would mean this letter would have had a different signature on it.

Embarassing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com