Path Axes 20 Percent Of Staff In A ‘Realigning Of The Company’ | Hacker News Reader

Path Axes 20 Percent Of Staff In A ‘Realigning Of The Company’

techcrunch.com

51 pointscapkutay48 comments

Path laid off 13 staffers today, axing 20 percent of its workforce...

Path founder and CEO Dave Morin, who celebrated his 33rd birthday yesterday, has not responded to requests for comment.

Cmon Techcrunch, you should know that Path dude never answers his phone, it puts him on defense.

Some context for those who don't know the reference.

> "I don’t use a ring of any kind on my phone. This is so that I am always on offense and never defense." [1]

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/my-phone/2013/03/dave-mori...

lol.... that honestly made me laugh. I never read the interview before but will make use of that line sometime. Regarding path, they need to boost numbers, so started exploiting peoples address books, when this worked they raised more money but those users where spammed and probably just deleted the app. The only thing i hear about path is the design, if you did a frequency distribution of word usage in path articles, it's about design. The funny thing is, i downloaded the app last year, then invited my wife to use it, she text me saying she didn't know how to use it and never did so i deleted it as well. Therefore the great design appealed to the tech inclined but to cross the chasm they needed familiar design like instagram & twitter.

Here's a great breakdown of the interview: http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/46539276780/...

Why doesn't that guy post more often? He's hilarious!

Also in meetings all day and all night.

I wonder which phone Techcrunch called.

They might have called his night phone this morning.

I'm surprised that so many people remember this.

It was recently mentioned in another thread in the past few days so it is fresh in the minds of some.

I bet Dave would take a call from Marissa Mayer.

Yahoo are pretty good at paying over the odds for mutton dressed as lamb.

Did they call his day phone or his night phone?

funny thing is he comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davemorin

Was Matt Van Horn one of them?

[Context: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog...]

No wonder Path and Klout are both laughingstocks in the Valley...

I wonder how many of those guys had job offers in their inbox before they had their exit interview.

Is Path particularly well-regarded?

Path itself is likely not regarded poorly, but with a shortage of good devs in the valley, I suspect the data people they've (possibly) let go would have had offers. Not so sure about marketing.

Not necessarily. But Silicon Valley engineers with startup experience who just lost their job and are likely to accept lowball offers so they can continue to pay their hyper-inflated apartment leases, those people are highly sought after.

Ha. Actually engineers in general are sought after out here simply because there's a shortage; which is likely due to the fact that outsiders hold your viewpoint.

NOT EVERYONE WHO MOVES TO THE BAY AREA LIVES OR NEEDS TO LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO. THERE ARE A PLETHORA OF OPTIONS.

Look at a map, jeesh.

I very much doubt engineers laid off from a well-regarded startup like Path would take low-ball offers. I've seen similar situations firsthand many times now, and I'm almost certain they will get multiple competitive offers.

Overlooking their privacy issues, the app was well done. The experience felt fresh when the app first came out. A few things I thought were particularly neat: the circular menu for posting statuses, the polished timeline, and the drawer (which to my knowledge they were the first to do).

And then they:

- silently stole your contacts, a move so shady it prompted Apple to quickly push an OS update allowing a per-app contacts access permission, then

- used the phone numbers of your contacts to send them completely false text messages saying you'd shared (unspecified) things with them on Path in an effort to get them to sign up (even when you had done no such thing), then

- leaked your location even when you had location services disabled for Path, then

- started effectively begging for change (subscriptions) every third screen.

Good riddance.

To be fair, every app at the time was silently stealing your contacts. Path was just the one that was singled out because they were high profile at the time.

I don't think many people would consider their product poorly designed (as in, visual design) or poorly engineered.

Maybe depends on their title? Software engineer, yeah probably getting nibbled to pieces. Other job description, ymmv.

None of the people let go were software engineers.

I think this is interesting because this may represent a pullback in the social/mobile consumer space from an investment standpoint. Path is a VC darling given that it raised over $40 million from the likes of KPCB (a firm that also mentioned a direction change[0]). Anyone talking about a SV bubble should consider that some companies with tremendous momentum are scaling back a little bit. It could be a healthy pull back.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540362

Either that or the market finally wised up to the fact that Path is managed by asstards who don't have a shred of respect for their customers.

It all comes back to you if you try screwing over the market, the market sees everything.

I love the market.

Consider that the people who made the biggest, shittiest decisions here made way more money while doing so than you did during the same period, most likely.

What do you mean by them having made more money than me?

As far as I can see, they have to sell Path for more than $41.2M before they make more money than $0 and that´s gonna be a tough one. I'm currently a bit above that number. ;)

They likely paid themselves executive level salaries out of that 41.2M all the while. If you're doing much better than a high-end developer salary, congrats, but if you're not, they prob paid themselves more than you.

Pullback started about 2 years ago.

I wrote about my experiences here trying to raise a seed round for an app that had considerable traction for the stage we were at http://blog.zmitri.com/startups/2013/06/14/you-need-a-millio...

Path was just well financed enough to make it this far.

"The spokesperson said that Path currently has 20 million users"

Has Path ever released a data point other than total number of registered users?

Translation: Path stole 20 million e-mail addresses from iOS and Android address books and spammed them.

Did Path destroy itself with questionable ethics[1] or is there really no way to compete with Facebook anymore?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/path-uploads-your-iphones-a...

Path originally touted the idea of having a limited friends group - only your closest. I thought that actually made sense.

Then they started spamming people in your phone book, completely ruining the entire point of their original pitch. Now they seem to make money selling stickers? I'm not sure why any self-respective developer would still be working there.

Neither? The address book debacle was a big deal for a little while, but the bad press faded quickly.

I also don't think Facebook's position is unchallengeable. After all, Facebook wasn't the first social network, and it looks like the youth today aren't using Facebook nearly as much as older generations, preferring newer apps like Snapchat.

In all likelihood Path destroyed itself by being a not-very-good Facebook competitor. This says little about the feasibility of toppling Facebook.

According to their site, they are still hiring for five positions. Maybe it's just a massive cleansing?

or they just haven't updated their website :)

They just fired the person who updates their website

That's what happens when you realise that it costs more to acquire a user than you can make money off him/her. There'll probably another layoff in 4 months and another one and then we have an acquihire, yeah!

Ugh, I tried to like it, but I just dont like Path. If I can think of a vanity startup with vanity PR, vanity founder, vanity metrics, it's Path. Ugh.

I'm the same. Really tried using and liking path for 6-8 months but I just couldn't find a use-case outside of using it like Instagram without having to admit I used Instagram. It's derivative and deliberately-limited for no perceivable benefit. And since everyone (even Trello!) is adding "stickers" Path had to hop on the bandwagon too.

To people who use Path - why do you use it over Facebook?

Facebook for me is just an address book of all my contacts. I never share anything personal there due to the number of privacy settings I need to hop through to make sure I shared with the right people.

Path is just a curated set of close friends with whom I feel free to share anything. Also when it came out Path mobile app is far better than Facebook.

I use Path (mostly) for pictures of my kids. Path is invite/opt-in which makes it easy to share with only the family and friends who are interested.

I don't want everyone on Facebook seeing my family photos any more than they want to be flooded with updates from a doting father.

I cannot tell from their website what this company does. (Other than that it might be a Facebook clone.)

That's basically what is. A Facebook clone focusing on mobile. They limit your number of friends and have a better mobile experience by doing things like putting things accessible from fewer screens, because mobile users hate multi-screen flows, etc..

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