I wish companies would report their CEO's internal performance reviews this year. I suspect it'll be framed as making the best out of a bad situation rather than severely misjudged macroeconomic conditions.
It's a nice thought but this would send companies hurtling towards IPOs even faster than they are already doing, and using even more tricks to pump the stock.
It’s a little more nuanced, “we were drunk on cheap money and over hired, just like everyone else with the belief growth would continue”
As interest rates plummeted to 0% and monetary policy pushed lots of money into the economy, companies had easy access to capital, and demand for products and services surged. Organizations hired aggressively to meet market demand and the war for talent reached a fever pitch. The result, for Lattice, was that growth skyrocketed.
Which is a reasonable thing to do, it probably takes 6 months to a year to get many employees up to full potential. So over hiring during growth makes sense, if you under hire, you’ll never catch up.
I wonder what the startup scene will be like with all these layoffs. I know a few people in the past who got together and started their own company after being laid off, using their severance as a runway.
In other news, all Lattice employees fire themselves and pocket 100K. That seems gamable unless they want to weasel on the 'up to'. It also is a bit strange to combine 'layoff' and 'investment' in the same email, it's a layoff, any sugarcoating should be in cash and not in possible investments.
The 100k investment (something they announced in Feb 2020) isn't an instant check for 100k, there are several conditions, [details here][1], and the relevant part being:
> The way it works is simple: if you’ve worked at Lattice for at least 3 years and part on amicable terms and if you start a new company within 12 months of leaving, Lattice will offer to invest up to $100,000 either at a $5 million valuation or at the terms of a seed round you are raising, whichever is higher. Lattice will look to support these companies through sharing advice, our network, and even partnership where applicable.
They aren't accelerating vesting. They're just removing the cliff. So if they hired you 6 months ago, you'll be eligible to exercise 6 months worth of vested options (or 1/8 of the total option grant).
"We removed the vesting cliff for employees who were with Lattice for less than one year. Their equity will vest monthly during their employment term as if they had reached the cliff. Employees will have up to 3 years to exercise their options post-exit."
12 weeks minimum severance (with paid healthcare), no cliff on vesting, 3 years to exercise, still eligible for the startup investment. Those sound like fairly generous terms to me.
Who gave tech CEOs permission to blame their mistakes of the past 2 years on ZIRP ? This has become a kind of meme. The problem is, ZIRP has been the reality, on and off (mostly on), since 2008.
Do you need permission to shift the blame for your own poor planning? As far as they're concerned, this was all played out just fine, they needed the headcount in case they could grow more, and if things changed, they can always lay off 15% of the workforce. I'll add the implicit statement to their note on ZIRP myself (in italics):
> Starting in the middle of 2020, the world moved in an unprecedented environment for many companies. As interest rates plummeted to 0% and monetary policy pushed lots of money into the economy, companies had easy access to capital, and demand for products and services surged. Organizations hired aggressively to meet market demand and the war for talent reached a fever pitch. The result, for Lattice, was that growth skyrocketed. [We either ignorantly assumed it would be like this forever, or knowingly took the risk that we'd have to lay people off when the economic picture meaningfully changed.]
> Fast forward a couple of years to 2023, and the economic picture has meaningfully changed.
(Aside, anyone else annoyed that so many companies have adopted the term "impacted" as the verb to refer to people who were laid off? The company is experiencing a layoff, an event as a noun, through which coworkers are impacted. Maybe I've only noticed this recently. It rubs me the wrong way, as we're avoiding saying what happened out loud, like the company is absolved from their responsibility as the subject performing the act of firing on the object. That said, the severance here is fairly generous so this isn't a knock on Lattice so much as pervasive SV culture.)
Lattice might be an actual instance of a business whose growth was commensurate with demand ("revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic"), but you'd have to imagine that a lot of other tech companies grew for the sake of growth enabled by ZIRP and pandemic hype for tech. There were a lot of valuations based on unrealistic future projections that seemed untethered to reality.
Maybe Lattice did the right thing, given the circumstances, but surely not all of the other headcount-exploding companies did. It seems like a copout to blame it all on ZIRP going away and not actual corporate leadership.
And yes I understand fiscal environments might compel said leadership to pursue that path, either as a game theory thing or because boards and investors agitate for it. But it still seems wrong to blame it all on the Fed and not bear any responsibility.
This pop psych/business management article from Stanford calling it "social contagion", but it framed it in a reductive way so a lot of people on HN were mad at it
I thought what this Stanford professor said was rather sensible, but some people want to believe that the tech industry always functions in a rational way.
Also a lot of people too easily fall for clickbait framing and they missed the point of the article, which is that layoffs have a lot of detrimental effects on people, don't always help the company, and can be sort of a cargo cult response to economic downturns. Instead they focused on the professor ignoring the actual economic causes, which is a fair critique but not the article's main thesis.
Wild guess: In the last 2 years they probably hired way more than the 15% they are cutting now.
15% which is 100 people in their case isn't even that much, they could have implemented a hiring stop and trimmed low performers over the next 6-12 months ending up with the same headcount.
Wild guess 2: Since they are letting go so few people, they'll do another round in the future.
I mean how many people said tech would be in a bubble until ZIRP was gone and then they'd need to "come back to reality" or similar? And the minor freakout in 2014-2015 when the Fed tried to raise rates? IIRC it was primarily in Tech like it was this past year.
The most successful companies/investors seem to be the ones which kept assuming ZIRP would continue when it shouldn't. What we should take away from that is probably worth an entire separate conversation, but it was the general sentiment. You couldn't really explain the size of VC deals any other way than "invested somewhere is better than invested no where".
Edit: Re another comment of band wagoning - It could simply be easier to do because others are already doing it, sure, but there are plenty of HN posts explaining the huge risk you're taking by laying people off to losing your best people.
"[M]uch of what we consider technological innovation is, in fact, business model innovation. I’d add that a lot of what is perceived as innovation is also some form of ZIRP-fueled arbitrage. Everything is ZIRP."
They all hired mediocre talent at inflated salaries over the last 2 years. We all were forced to hire. I've had VCs tell me i need to double engineer head count. I had CFOs tell me that they will take away my open headcount if i can't fill positions by fiscal end.
Having been through a bunch of tech organizations, this letter is a high watermark for treating people with respect and candour about the business, which is objective thing they share. It goes a long way to positioning people well to manage the change in their own lives.
A rare demonstration of ownership, and it helps anyone laid off demonstrate the kind of culture they can bring with them to their new roles. Anyone who worked in the culture that produces that level of ownership will be a valuable asset wherever they go.
I thought they were talking about Lattice Semiconductor for a good 5 minutes. I figured a hardware company with just over 700 employees was pretty damn lean, and didn't understand why they were downsizing.
Turns out no, this a a cloud based HR platform - which made me balk at the fact they had just over 700 employees.
Presumably a lot of that is sales/support. Their customers are start-up HR "departments" (i.e. one or two people who worked as an HR generalist at a bigger company).
We use Lattice and it’s uh, perfectly fine but has all the functionality of a Django demo project. I’m sure they have to put a lot of employee time into integrations and custom onboarding from other platforms, etc. But its core is literally just text forms to write peer reviews and to organize OKRs
Honestly, any company which leads from the top like this, instead of having HR just ambush people about a "difficult discussion" they need to have, is going to be rated up high to me. Even more so, a company with generous layoff terms -- which these are. No one is at fault here.
What's happening in tech and the economy in general might new for some of you, or the first time in your working career that you're worried about your job because, for the past 15 years or so, tech has been largely insulated from other small cycles which have happened. Economies have downturns and cycles, and in your lifetime you'll see it many times.
My parents struggled so much in the 80s to put me through school. My dad had to take a job in a different state and live away for 6 months just so we could keep our house and the lights on. I will never forget that time. Or 2001 when so many dot coms busted, as did my first job. Or in 2008 when half my colleagues in finance were walked out the door. Or 2011's mini recession.
It gets better, and this all will pass. To me, it certainly makes a difference how people treat each other when times are tough, and I can find no fault of this CEO or company. Nor of Zuckerburg when I read and listened to his message and felt, to me, genuine sadness in having to make such a decision.
It's tough times - let's all avoid cynicism and see if we can help anyone we know impacted by a job loss by our networks. Go write up a referral for someone on LinkedIn. Call a friend who's struggling and just listen to them. That's all you can really do.
Because he's responsible for the fact they need to do this?
This email is basically:
Oh dear we're in a tight spot, no idea how we got here, it's a mystery! I guess someone (definitely not me!) ran the business in a way that demonstrated an appalling understanding of our market, our customers, and the macro climate, and a fundamental carelessness with investor money and employee livelihoods. Don't worry though, that person was definitely not me, so I'm the right person to lead us out of this.
p.s. look shiny severance packages!!!
p.p.s. Once again, that person was not me, so there shouldn't be any consequences for me, other than a bunch of easily impressed tech workers giving me praise for the severance package.
It's the CEO/leader's job to make these decisions and to course correct when he's made a mistake. Publicly admonishing himself is, at best, a pointless display of virtue signaling. He could write 10 pages groveling for forgiveness from his employees and the public, but people would complain about that too.
I suspect the overall CEO compensation package for a company the size and structure of Lattice is trivial compared to other expenses.
One could sit and read 10 pages of groveling for forgiveness but it still won't replace the paycheck that's going away. It would likely be about as effective as a spouse begging for forgiveness after getting caught in a multi-year affair.
The board and investors and remaining employees don't need an apology. They need better leadership, or they need performance management of the current leadership with actual consequences, as they would rightly expect for any other failing employee.
I'm not suggesting he publicly admonish himself or take a "virtue signalling" pay cut or something. I'm suggesting the board fire him or other parts of leadership for cause, and hire people who make better decisions.
Presumably the board have considered that course of action and decided against it. It’s just possible that they have access to information that you don’t, and so have come to a different conclusion.
Totally plausible. The credulous awarding of PR points by tech workers on HN whenever a blog post describing severance > $0 is even more stupid without that information asymmetry in mind.
You are framing it like this company exists in vacuum and can ignore all external factors. And that is clearly not the case. They decided to regroup and downsize during tougher times, that's all.
I think the "CEO pay should be cut for layoffs" comments come from a misunderstanding of how CEO pay differs between public companies and VC-backed companies.
A VC backed CEO is usually paid a lower salary than the average software developer. Their biggest pay is by owning a lot of equity that's on a standard vesting schedule. Cutting their salary would be entirely performative. And clawing back equity is difficult and only matters is the company does well.
A public company CEO is usually not the founder. They're compensated with stock bonuses (that can be almost immediately liquidated) based on performance, as well as a large salary.
I think forgoing a bonus when you're the CEO and doing layoffs would be great. Unfortunately, that goes against the interest of the CEO and investors
The other part that rubs me the wrong way, some? "We will continue to offer you the Invest in your People fund, where we might invest $100K in your startup".
"We have to lay 15% of you off, but don't worry, we can still find $100K's all over to speculatively invest in startups"...
Yeah, I don't get the lust for blood that people have like clockwork whenever layoffs occur and the CEO is forthright about taking the blame. Would it be better if they handled it like Elon [1]? I don't recall people wondering aloud if Elon took a pay cut when that happened. Do we really think this is preferable to layoffs like Lattice, or Coinbase, or Stripe, and wish this style was more of the norm?
Because the CEOs usually stay rich and the people who lose their jobs don't. And there's no rule stating that the CEO has to make 1000x what other people do. If you want to keep it that way, good on you. Some folks want something different and so they hold executives to a different standard!
Read the letter again. This CEO is absolutely not forthright about taking the blame. He doesn't even speculate about root causes, much less assign blame. He describes the problem...
"While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place."
...but nowhere does he talk about why these things happened.
He literally uses the passive voice top avoid taking responsibility ("our organization was built" not "I built").
You come away with the feeling this is a good letter in which he takes responsibility because he distracts you by spending the rest of the letter describing the details of the severance offer, which is completely orthogonal to the issue of root causes and responsibility.
I'll acknowledge you're correct (if slightly cynical) and I'm being naive (if optimistic). This is an interesting area that deserves further scrutiny and research -- I don't pretend to have the answer.
There are a few really positive comments like this popping up in this thread.
I'm really curious how this specific press release is different than the Coinbase one [0] (or most of the others on the homepage this week), where the HN crowd was demanding that the CEO "take accountability" and resign, or reduce CEO pay, etc etc
To be honest, this press release reads basically the same as 10+ other tech layoff press releases I've read this week. Including nearly identical severance packages.
One reason could be because HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch, being a crypto company in the first place which ideological quibbles aside is seen as extravagantly unsustainable and thus doomed to fail).
Lattice is in a more mainstream ("useful") industry and its CEO doesn't have a record of courting controversy, so it gets more sympathy. It doesn't come with the downsides of being a ubiquitous brand or association with a controversial sector. Plus it's a smaller company so it's more of an underdog. Also the startup funding offer is neat and intriguing.
"HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch..."
lol, who the heck thinks that not getting into NFT market was a mistake? If anything, they did themselves a favor by not building many NFT capabilities.
NFTs might have a second chance in the future but currently is just a mass graveyard of scams.
NFTs were a short fad (did it even last a year?), but CB being the market leader for crypto wallets meant they should’ve had an NFT feature ready far earlier. This is a “performance” critique of them getting big and complacent and unable to execute while nimbler startups ran circles around them.
How is jumping on every fad a good thing? Focusing on their core business and not getting distracted by small month-long fads happening in their general industry sounds a lot more sensible.
It was a very lucrative fad, and as per that other thread, it sounds like Coinbase bought into it anyway by increasing headcount to build an NFT offering anyway, just after they were late to the party. If that’s accurate, then lose-lose.
That's a fair rebuttal, and I will admit that my recollection of last year is filtered through the very strange time compression of the COVID WFH era, and the extent of my perception of this was "What's an NFT? Is that something you can manage with Coinbase? There's another app now?" From an extremely layman view, it just seemed natural that the leading crypto app would support NFTs. But I'm not the only one to voice the opinion that it seemed like Coinbase had missed the NFT wave.
I'm not a fan of big companies xeroxing each other's features, as it seems to be a dominant form of product "innovation" these days, but one could have assumed that Coinbase, being market leader in this space, would have done that for NFTs.
And on the note of it being an extremely short fad- it is interesting that on occasion, the big tech incumbents might actually beat the upstart errant. Clubhouse seems pretty stagnant now, but Twitter Spaces seems to have had more vitality, even if it's just leaning on that site's massive social network as well as some free publicity from the current CEO's public drama. Of course, the NFT market exists independently of what any one company.
Seeing the comment under your very reasonable take is "One of the best comments on HN ever. Thank you!"
I'd say the saccharin sweet tone in this comment section is mostly born of personal feelings. If the Coinbase CEO was a more integral, well-liked part of the SV founder scene, the same exact letter would have been just fine for most of these people.
This is a pretty disengeous response, it's clear I'm not saying it's because it's Coinbase or Coinbase's CEO.
I'm saying it's because it's the literal individual "Jack Altman", outside of his capacity as a CEO, has personally rubbed elbows with the right crowd.
Lattice had 700+ employees working on a product that HN would normally lampoon for having even 100 working on, they were massively bloated and there is literally no chance the organization wasn't aware that they were hiring people who wouldn't add enough value to weather any sort of mild storm (and they all but say that in the letter).
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They did so because it shows growth, and they put company growth above even the slightest bit resiliency because that's the playbook. Show growth at all costs because you can just fire those people and write a cutesy letter and a severance package with... some of the money that showing growth let you raise!
It's a crappy thing founders often do, but again, if you sling tweets with the right crowd and hang with the right people, all is forgiven.
Essentially the CEO gets to behave badly, as long as the person is well liked. That's not how a meritocracy based on anything like "brand equity" should work.
Every single time it's the same template, every single time the CEO is the villain, until we got one that was part of the in crowd.
I think people forget how tight knit the SV crowd can be. A lot of these people are former class mates/team mates/etc. It's a softer version of nepotism where any failings are taken much softer because these are people who just might rub your back the right way down the line due to proximity.
Hackernews has a problem with crypto. Just see any thread related to crypto for the completely one sided and biased view most users on this site have. They will willfully ignore all valid and good uses cases for it so they can feel smart and self righteous when they see it crash…
Still waiting to hear one of these valid and good uses cases for a publicly distributed ledger. One of these days I’ll hear one, but I haven’t yet. Circumventing oppressive regimes seems to be the only thing I’ve heard of that vaguely sounds like a value proposition.
That you don't see one just means that you don't see one and by shouting down anyone else who disagrees, as the HN hivemind has in every crypto thread I've seen to date, doesn't mean one exists, it just means that in this community a valid and good use case may as well not exist. People, including me, have tried to explain, many times, the valid use cases but HN at large disagrees and has made that distaste clear. That's fine but you'll forgive us for giving up. Those you disagree with aren't idiots, they just have a different perspective and don't see it as useless.
I'd love to have a meaningful conversation. I'd love to hear a novel idea. You have to forgive me for being a little jaded though when I continually ask to hear a use case and I continually don't get use cases.
"Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.
At risk of sounding like I'm patronizing you, which I'm not, that ship has sailed. If you'd like to view arguments by people with a more balanced view of crypto, there are a ton of threads you can find on the topic with the help of Algolia. Maybe when the HN majority finds a way to interact with us that isn't awful, people like me will be willing to engage in discussion again.
Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable.
Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem?
Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?
"That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity?
One key difference is that the Coinbase message said "accountability rests with me as the CEO". If you claim to take accountability, but there are no actual consequences, it's just the CEO grandstanding. Doesn't seem surprising that this specific bit would get called out.
This message did not make such obviously false claims of accountability. Is that enough of a difference to make up the entire difference in the entire tenor of the conversation? I don't know. But it is at least the reason for your specific example.
No, but a CEO can slash his own pay to reflect the current situation. For example, when the WiiU was a flop, Nintendo's CEO personally decided to take a paycut of about 50%[0]
I believe this should be the standard for any CEO who wants to say they take accountability.
My point is not that they should take “pain”. My point is that they shouldn’t go around talking about “taking full responsibility” when there is no negative consequence for them. I guess it’s just an emotional / cultural norm.
E.g. if somebody is committed of a crime and says “I take full responsibility for my actions” to the judge just before being sentenced, then that is a very strong signal of character for me.
But if somebody says “I take full responsibility for my actions” just before jumping in an Uber to go to a luxury dinner with the board of directors, then that does not impress me and I perceive it as a cheap attempt to reap the social benefits of saying that phrase with none of the potential costs.
What I'm trying to drive at is whether there is any satisfactory way for a CEO in this position to "take responsibility for their actions" without raising your ire. What would they have to do? Then we can look at whether that's a reasonable thing to expect of someone in such a position.
My initial instinct is that this line of argument is more like venting than it is any kind of real suggestion for behavior change.
Of course they aren't going to actually suffer any consequences. We all know that's not how this works, which is exactly why it's so risible. But something reasonable and totally under their own control is to not brag about holding themselves accountable when they know nothing will happen.
It's basically making the layoff about themselves, rather than the poor sods who just lost their jobs. (There's some other common patterns in that vein too, e.g. "this is the hardest decision I've ever had to do".)
If you want to acknowledge being at fault, that's totally fine. Just write the facts. The over-hiring was a mistake, and you're the one who made that decision. Don't dress it up into a personal journey of failure and redemption.
How is saying "accountability rests with me as the CEO" different from saying that they're the one who made the decision? Is that really dressing it up? Or just saying the same thing with different words? It really seems like you have a different definition of "accountability" than other people.
I think it’s you how’s confused about the words involved here. For example you switch between the concepts “take responsibility” and “be accountable” as if they were the same thing. They’re not.
The job of the C-suite is accurate forecasting which is why they make 400x what the line worker does in large companies. Obviously they don't have a crystal ball but if scaled up the company hugely during a black swan event like covid and assumed that was the new normal I'd be personally ashamed and would either resign or give back my salary for a year+ to keep most of those employees and find a function for them. Perhaps via retraining, perhaps with instituting optional pay cuts to let people work 4 days a week, etc.
When a few well funded companies absorb all of the growth in headcount do you believe they are allocating resources effectively against the overall economy’s need? That’s what happened here. Company A got cash to burn at no interest. Decided to hire more people and buy more services. Service company B saw a spike in POs and raised more capital to do the same. So up the chain with C,D,E, etc. But when raising money or hiring, none of them strayed too far from their original vision/thesis because boards and the public don’t like that (see: reaction to the Metaverse). So it just concentrated more eyeballs and dollars on a proportionally smaller surface.
Every single CEO seems to have made the same mistake. I can't believe that they didn't see this coming. My businesses also grew intensely during the pandemic, but if I thought that rate would last, I would have considered myself the stupidest leader on the ground.
This is just so short sighted from Jack and other such CEOs.
I kind of agree but, of course, the elephant in the room is the whole culture that these companies exist in:
Raise large amounts of money
Grow exponentially
Have a sweet exit for the investors
Nothing that happened is surprising in this light. Even with a "nice" CEO and generous layoff terms, the simple issue is that the market for any given company can only ever be so big and the CEO doesn't get to choose "less growth" with investors breathing down their necks.
> ..and the CEO doesn't get to choose "less growth" with investors breathing down their necks.
Investors in private and public businesses demand growth, so naturally executives will optimize for that. I'm currently at a Series B company that has a product, growing customer base, strong revenue, etc. and we're starting the Series C process. We've crafted a plan for responsible organic growth by investing in efficiency and growing lines of business with a lower cost to serve, but even in this environment, a significant number of investors are still looking for a "pump in the cash and grow fast" story.
He never said it was a mistake. In acknowledging that hires were made on the basis of temporarily cheap money and a temporary opportunity, the CEO seems to be acknowledging that they never intended to maintain that level of staffing.
This is a common part of the boom-bust cycle of many corporate firms. They use cheap money and labor to reposition / grow / etc., then when the work is done and wages start increasing, they cut back on staffing and reap the profits of their new position with a skeleton crew.
Not a mistake. A calculated risk that didn't pan out.
The letter says that the takeaway at the executive level is a greater emphasis on building an all-weather business.
But frankly, investors often don't want an all-weather business. Lattice is a venture-backed startup. Having an all-weather business means being more risk-averse than you otherwise could be, which limits growth in the good times. Investors want a company that can quickly shed excess weight during a recession and then quickly grow again when conditions are favorable. That's how you get the high growth that attracts VCs.
Something tells me that most CEOs who commit to running an all-weather business during this period of contraction will conveniently forget about it when times are better.
In fact, they may use similar justification, that their hands are tied. During the downturn, it's "We had to lay these people off to make sure the larger organization can survive," and during a bull market, it's, "We had to grow rapidly to secure additional funding, which is necessary to make sure the larger organization can survive."
"Investors don't necessarily want an all-weather business."
This may be true for some investors, but the largest hedge fund in the world Bridgewater) is famous for their all-weather fund.
That means that those investors do exist.
If you take that into account, that means that they chose investors who do not want an all-weather company, and thereby gambled not only with their own personal well-being, but with other people's career's and incomes on a risky bet -- as the top comment said, it was obvious that these rates wouldn't stay the same.
I think that's largely true but not absolutely true. What all investors want is return on capital, what VCs are gambling on is that 1/10 (or 2-3 in a 100) are going to be moonshots, they're taking higher risks and hoping for higher rewards.
The dichotomy of "higher risk vs higher reward", however, isn't as real as people feel it is. There are low-risk & high rewards style investing (it's the base premise of value investing, whether focused or not). VCs do not want you to lose their money, and so doing something that is predictably bad is not what they want.
They do want you to go for moonshots... but again, this is predictably bad. I think you'll be harder pressed to find a company that has continued to do well by over-hiring through pandemic times.
"despite their funds maintaining..." -- the largest the AUM, the harder it is to make good returns. This is well documented/commented by all the large fund holders. It is significantly easier to make good returns with less money.
> Something tells me that most CEOs who commit to running an all-weather business during this period of contraction will forget about it when times are better.
Bingo.
It will be very interesting when the interest rates climb back down, to see how many CEO's will actually be hiring conservatively. One nice thing: we now have public documentation of their apology letters, so it will be quite a PR exercise to go back on their words. But I'm sure the consultants they hire will come up with the right kind of spin.
As a perennial negative Nancy, I'm pretty skeptical of this over "irrational exuberance". Every five to ten years everyone thinks that they are at the start of a brand new normal, where everything will be up and to the right forever, and then, oops that wasn't right.
People were being a little silly about the pandemic boom, we should just say that and not give out passes for being a part of the crowd.
> But frankly, investors often don't want an all-weather business.
So many of these startup aren't build around a solid sustainable business model but around an exit. Fuck the employees, fuck the customers, all leadership cares about is making it to an exit so they can all cash out. They all saw an opportunity to accelerate that cash out during the free money, everyone is a unicorn years, unfortunately most of them were never going to cash out and now that no one is throwing free money at them to keep their pipe dreams afloat, the employees and customers take the brunt of their greed while they waltz off to their next boondoggle.
I don't know that I agree. I think it's gotten significantly worse under the VC/PE monstrosity that has grown over the last decade. The dishonesty has been ratcheted up and there are more Shkreli's, Bankman-Fried's and Holmes's dominating the conversation.
It's mind boggling. The amount of money being thrown at these "companies" and how quickly the burn it with nothing to show at then end. The principles then move on unscathed and someone writes them another check.
I’d invest in index funds and similar boring vehicles, not VC, if I wanted a reliable growth business. Perhaps venture into PE if I was feeling saucy and had access. It’s the reality where we reap what we sow
When so many generally-smart people make the same mistake, I always wonder what the incentives are that put them there.
Was it fear of being left out of the free-money-on-the-table if they didn't keep telling everyone growth would last forever, thus justifying investing more money in them to capitalize on that growth? I always have to keep in mind that public statements companies make are at least equal parts fire-for-effect as declaration of truth; they are bound by law to make some true statements, but they also pepper statements heavily with words chosen to illicit the desired behavior in investors (current and potential) and competitors.
It might make more sense to think of these folks, not as smart people operating independently, but as part of a larger social ecosystem. They claim to be purely data driven, but generally that's not really true. A lot of decision making comes down to social conditioning and peer pressure.
In particular, I would say its not malicious, but just how society works. If you see your peers (other CEO's), the people you respect and report to (VC, investors) all saying similar things and nudging you to go in a specific direction, its easier to think you're on the right direction, easier to ignore signals that might point to the fact that your decision making is flawed.
The unfortunate truth is that they have the "excuse" that everyone around them was caught by surprise, so its "not their fault" (i.e. they're still a good leader) and investors will buy it. The people that lose out are the affected employees; they just need to be nice and polite, apologize profusely and move on, while its the employees that lose the most.
Would be interesting if there was a way for corporate boards to be more accountable for their mistakes in situations like the current tech layoffs. It is somewhat understandable if in a lot of these cases the CEOs are just cat’s paws of the will of the boards.
I suppose activist investors who pushed for aggressive growth strategies because of the FOMO environment will be losing a lot of money, but that's little comfort to the people losing their jobs.
> I suppose activist investors who pushed for aggressive growth strategies because of the FOMO environment will be losing a lot of money, but that's little comfort to the people losing their jobs.
Right, and I see little in the news about investors taking responsibility for misreading the market and losing value, all the fault appears to rest with the CEO's for hiring aggressively and for employees not being productive enough.
In a certain sense, I think we need more journalists that cover tech, so that we can get deep dives and some real answers. What we currently have is "journalists" whose main source of news is going to events/parties, socializing with the elite and then parroting their perspectives. There is very little "hard" journalism happening here, its more "access" journalism.
Yes everyone knew it would end, but nobody knew exactly when. Choosing not to expand when there was cheap capital and increased customer demand would have been a pretty bad decision as well. Many of these companies expanded by like 3-5x and are now having to downsize by like 10-20%. That doesn't seem like a reckless overshoot to me.
It is easy to point the finger at the CEOs and say, "you should have seen this coming." (In fact, I did that exact thing yesterday, check my comment history.) However, I don't think all of these choices were made in a vacuum. I suspect some of these started as 'suggestions' from the board/investors. I quoted that because it has the same connotation as a suggestion from your boss: power imbalances skew the optionality of it quite a bit.
There seem to be some resemblances to religion here: the downturn indicates that the gods are angry, and must be appeased through sacrifices. The CEO acts as high priest, carrying out the sacrifice, absorbing the blame generated by it. That may seem like a far-fetched analogy, but there's a certain liturgy to the whole process.
It illustrates the popularized image of CEO as fully-realized alpha male who answers to no one is naive at best. Almost everyone has to answer to someone. And that definitely impacts how they make decisions.
My company started using Lattice for performance reviews a couple years ago, and everyone initially thought it was some internal tool that someone from HR had quickly put together from a bootstrap template. I then found out that they are a VC-backed company with hundreds of millions in funding and a ~$3B valuation (at least at the start of 2022). We thankfully don't use it anymore, since I assume someone higher up realized that we don't need to pay $25+ per employee per month to send out a feedback form once a year.
I normally cringe at all the "I could build it in a weekend" posts here, but with Lattice I genuinely cannot understand what the 1000+ employees even do. Is there anything more to the company than the founder's last name and industry connections through his brother?
> While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place.
What's with all this "you get to keep your laptop" moves... do employees really use their company laptop for everything?
Protip: Have your own laptop for your own stuff – it'll save you from all kinds of headache down the line, and shield you from all kinds of potential risk
It's because they are depreciating assets. If you don't have plans to hire again in the near future, there isn't much of a point in holding on to them.
They may not use them for everything but the laptops probably don't have much value for the company, not enough to make it worth having them shipped back, cleaned/refurbed, reinstalled, for new employees that may not exist for a while. The way it's framed in the letter is a little odd, but I guess they felt they had to say something other than "they're not worth our time".
Certainly probably costs more in 'helpdesk' time to collect them, make sure the employee returned all their employer supplied chargers, docks, etc and get them reimaged and back into rotation than it would cost to replace.
As someone that went through a similar 'just keep it' event. My personal laptop was already better, but my sister's sure as shit wasn't.
How do these companies ensure that the hard drives get cleared of company data? I would expect most companies handle information that is legally restricted and have an obligation to ensure employees don't keep a stray copy of customer information.
realistically? I've worked in HIPAA environment before, with secured corporate laptop, access keys to various departments, etc. Any person walking in there with a lowly USB stick could walk out with private personal data and no one would have a clue. It's just theater. I suppose for some sort of legal compliance thing you might want a laptop back so you can check a box on some form that says you did your role in the theater. Sure.
It is touted as a perk but mostly it isn't worth the cost of shipping + repurposing them. The concern is usually company data, but if you trust your employees to wipe the laptop correctly then there's really no problem with letting them keep it.
Alternate view: Growing a business to meet customer demands when times are good and contracting it when customer demand wanes is probably more efficient and results in higher employment than structuring your company to weather all storms with no loss of headcount.
That said, layoffs suck, particularly for those affected. It seems like this company is communicating and providing a softer landing than most.
Accountability would be the CEOs of these companies stepping down after they've made enough mistakes (both hiring too much and then not reaching growth targets). As usual workers get screwed and management coasts on unaffected.
I worked at Lattice a few years ago, back when it was under 100 people (probably doxxing myself, but whatever). They did a similar layoff right when covid hit. This definitely seems to be Jack's style, owning his decisions and not doing an HR hit-job. This post will work in his favor, no doubt. Glad to see Lattice prioritizing employees -- big fan of the 100k investment idea.
Seeing a lot of people shitting on the product in this comment forum. Plenty of their products are gimmicks, sure, but their real product is that they have a cult-following from the HR community, and they are better positioned to iterate and compete with more mainstream HR tools if they play their cards right. Lord knows they have way too many sales people (AKA "surplus elites"), and need to focus more on their product if they want to have something HR teams don't just want, but need, especially in this new macroeconomic condition. Hopefully the company can move on from this quickly. I don't think Jack is the kind of person who will fuck this opportunity up.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadBoard should automatically reduce CEO pay to $1.00 for the current and the next year every time a CEO "takes responsibility".
As interest rates plummeted to 0% and monetary policy pushed lots of money into the economy, companies had easy access to capital, and demand for products and services surged. Organizations hired aggressively to meet market demand and the war for talent reached a fever pitch. The result, for Lattice, was that growth skyrocketed.
Which is a reasonable thing to do, it probably takes 6 months to a year to get many employees up to full potential. So over hiring during growth makes sense, if you under hire, you’ll never catch up.
You join the Googlers, Xooglers, Nooglers, Metamates, Amazonians, Stripes, Tweeps, Peeps, Veeps, Rackers, Krakenites and Plaids.
- 12 weeks pay, more for longer tenure
- /wrong info deleted/ 3 years to exercise (Corrected: Removal of vesting cliff, not full vesting)
- healthcare for 3 months
- get to keep laptop equipment
- up to 100k investment if the laid off employee does their own startup, using Lattice for HR purposes
> The way it works is simple: if you’ve worked at Lattice for at least 3 years and part on amicable terms and if you start a new company within 12 months of leaving, Lattice will offer to invest up to $100,000 either at a $5 million valuation or at the terms of a seed round you are raising, whichever is higher. Lattice will look to support these companies through sharing advice, our network, and even partnership where applicable.
[1]: https://lattice.com/blog/lattice-announces-the-invest-in-you...
They aren't accelerating vesting. They're just removing the cliff. So if they hired you 6 months ago, you'll be eligible to exercise 6 months worth of vested options (or 1/8 of the total option grant).
"We removed the vesting cliff for employees who were with Lattice for less than one year. Their equity will vest monthly during their employment term as if they had reached the cliff. Employees will have up to 3 years to exercise their options post-exit."
> Starting in the middle of 2020, the world moved in an unprecedented environment for many companies. As interest rates plummeted to 0% and monetary policy pushed lots of money into the economy, companies had easy access to capital, and demand for products and services surged. Organizations hired aggressively to meet market demand and the war for talent reached a fever pitch. The result, for Lattice, was that growth skyrocketed. [We either ignorantly assumed it would be like this forever, or knowingly took the risk that we'd have to lay people off when the economic picture meaningfully changed.]
> Fast forward a couple of years to 2023, and the economic picture has meaningfully changed.
(Aside, anyone else annoyed that so many companies have adopted the term "impacted" as the verb to refer to people who were laid off? The company is experiencing a layoff, an event as a noun, through which coworkers are impacted. Maybe I've only noticed this recently. It rubs me the wrong way, as we're avoiding saying what happened out loud, like the company is absolved from their responsibility as the subject performing the act of firing on the object. That said, the severance here is fairly generous so this isn't a knock on Lattice so much as pervasive SV culture.)
Maybe Lattice did the right thing, given the circumstances, but surely not all of the other headcount-exploding companies did. It seems like a copout to blame it all on ZIRP going away and not actual corporate leadership.
And yes I understand fiscal environments might compel said leadership to pursue that path, either as a game theory thing or because boards and investors agitate for it. But it still seems wrong to blame it all on the Fed and not bear any responsibility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34339698
15% which is 100 people in their case isn't even that much, they could have implemented a hiring stop and trimmed low performers over the next 6-12 months ending up with the same headcount.
Wild guess 2: Since they are letting go so few people, they'll do another round in the future.
The most successful companies/investors seem to be the ones which kept assuming ZIRP would continue when it shouldn't. What we should take away from that is probably worth an entire separate conversation, but it was the general sentiment. You couldn't really explain the size of VC deals any other way than "invested somewhere is better than invested no where".
Edit: Re another comment of band wagoning - It could simply be easier to do because others are already doing it, sure, but there are plenty of HN posts explaining the huge risk you're taking by laying people off to losing your best people.
https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
A rare demonstration of ownership, and it helps anyone laid off demonstrate the kind of culture they can bring with them to their new roles. Anyone who worked in the culture that produces that level of ownership will be a valuable asset wherever they go.
Turns out no, this a a cloud based HR platform - which made me balk at the fact they had just over 700 employees.
(But maybe some math nerd had registered it even earlier.)
"Dick Tracey ... Prune Face ... Prune Tracey ...", and you are left to figure out the rest ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFArYx3Ay84&t=3s
Formerly Chuck’s.
What's happening in tech and the economy in general might new for some of you, or the first time in your working career that you're worried about your job because, for the past 15 years or so, tech has been largely insulated from other small cycles which have happened. Economies have downturns and cycles, and in your lifetime you'll see it many times.
My parents struggled so much in the 80s to put me through school. My dad had to take a job in a different state and live away for 6 months just so we could keep our house and the lights on. I will never forget that time. Or 2001 when so many dot coms busted, as did my first job. Or in 2008 when half my colleagues in finance were walked out the door. Or 2011's mini recession.
It gets better, and this all will pass. To me, it certainly makes a difference how people treat each other when times are tough, and I can find no fault of this CEO or company. Nor of Zuckerburg when I read and listened to his message and felt, to me, genuine sadness in having to make such a decision.
It's tough times - let's all avoid cynicism and see if we can help anyone we know impacted by a job loss by our networks. Go write up a referral for someone on LinkedIn. Call a friend who's struggling and just listen to them. That's all you can really do.
This email is basically:
Oh dear we're in a tight spot, no idea how we got here, it's a mystery! I guess someone (definitely not me!) ran the business in a way that demonstrated an appalling understanding of our market, our customers, and the macro climate, and a fundamental carelessness with investor money and employee livelihoods. Don't worry though, that person was definitely not me, so I'm the right person to lead us out of this.
p.s. look shiny severance packages!!!
p.p.s. Once again, that person was not me, so there shouldn't be any consequences for me, other than a bunch of easily impressed tech workers giving me praise for the severance package.
I suspect the overall CEO compensation package for a company the size and structure of Lattice is trivial compared to other expenses.
I mean, are we certain of that? Maybe someone should try it first.
A VC backed CEO is usually paid a lower salary than the average software developer. Their biggest pay is by owning a lot of equity that's on a standard vesting schedule. Cutting their salary would be entirely performative. And clawing back equity is difficult and only matters is the company does well.
A public company CEO is usually not the founder. They're compensated with stock bonuses (that can be almost immediately liquidated) based on performance, as well as a large salary.
I think forgoing a bonus when you're the CEO and doing layoffs would be great. Unfortunately, that goes against the interest of the CEO and investors
"We have to lay 15% of you off, but don't worry, we can still find $100K's all over to speculatively invest in startups"...
[1] https://www.kron4.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2022/11/tw...
"While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place."
...but nowhere does he talk about why these things happened.
He literally uses the passive voice top avoid taking responsibility ("our organization was built" not "I built").
You come away with the feeling this is a good letter in which he takes responsibility because he distracts you by spending the rest of the letter describing the details of the severance offer, which is completely orthogonal to the issue of root causes and responsibility.
I'm really curious how this specific press release is different than the Coinbase one [0] (or most of the others on the homepage this week), where the HN crowd was demanding that the CEO "take accountability" and resign, or reduce CEO pay, etc etc
To be honest, this press release reads basically the same as 10+ other tech layoff press releases I've read this week. Including nearly identical severance packages.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34323336
Lattice is in a more mainstream ("useful") industry and its CEO doesn't have a record of courting controversy, so it gets more sympathy. It doesn't come with the downsides of being a ubiquitous brand or association with a controversial sector. Plus it's a smaller company so it's more of an underdog. Also the startup funding offer is neat and intriguing.
lol, who the heck thinks that not getting into NFT market was a mistake? If anything, they did themselves a favor by not building many NFT capabilities.
NFTs might have a second chance in the future but currently is just a mass graveyard of scams.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/07/15/nft-marketpla...
I'm not a fan of big companies xeroxing each other's features, as it seems to be a dominant form of product "innovation" these days, but one could have assumed that Coinbase, being market leader in this space, would have done that for NFTs.
And on the note of it being an extremely short fad- it is interesting that on occasion, the big tech incumbents might actually beat the upstart errant. Clubhouse seems pretty stagnant now, but Twitter Spaces seems to have had more vitality, even if it's just leaning on that site's massive social network as well as some free publicity from the current CEO's public drama. Of course, the NFT market exists independently of what any one company.
I'd say the saccharin sweet tone in this comment section is mostly born of personal feelings. If the Coinbase CEO was a more integral, well-liked part of the SV founder scene, the same exact letter would have been just fine for most of these people.
I'm saying it's because it's the literal individual "Jack Altman", outside of his capacity as a CEO, has personally rubbed elbows with the right crowd.
Lattice had 700+ employees working on a product that HN would normally lampoon for having even 100 working on, they were massively bloated and there is literally no chance the organization wasn't aware that they were hiring people who wouldn't add enough value to weather any sort of mild storm (and they all but say that in the letter).
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They did so because it shows growth, and they put company growth above even the slightest bit resiliency because that's the playbook. Show growth at all costs because you can just fire those people and write a cutesy letter and a severance package with... some of the money that showing growth let you raise!
It's a crappy thing founders often do, but again, if you sling tweets with the right crowd and hang with the right people, all is forgiven.
Essentially the CEO gets to behave badly, as long as the person is well liked. That's not how a meritocracy based on anything like "brand equity" should work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33895773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33961410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809631
Every single time it's the same template, every single time the CEO is the villain, until we got one that was part of the in crowd.
I think people forget how tight knit the SV crowd can be. A lot of these people are former class mates/team mates/etc. It's a softer version of nepotism where any failings are taken much softer because these are people who just might rub your back the right way down the line due to proximity.
No, most reasonable adults have a problem with crypto.
"Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.
The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains).
These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.
"any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there.
Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable.
Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem?
Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?
I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/
What's the advantage in burning the entire power consumption of Zaire for a month, just to pay for a tin of beans?
This message did not make such obviously false claims of accountability. Is that enough of a difference to make up the entire difference in the entire tenor of the conversation? I don't know. But it is at least the reason for your specific example.
I believe this should be the standard for any CEO who wants to say they take accountability.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25941070
Just because someone is responsible for something doesn't mean they need to be punished.
E.g. if somebody is committed of a crime and says “I take full responsibility for my actions” to the judge just before being sentenced, then that is a very strong signal of character for me.
But if somebody says “I take full responsibility for my actions” just before jumping in an Uber to go to a luxury dinner with the board of directors, then that does not impress me and I perceive it as a cheap attempt to reap the social benefits of saying that phrase with none of the potential costs.
My initial instinct is that this line of argument is more like venting than it is any kind of real suggestion for behavior change.
It's basically making the layoff about themselves, rather than the poor sods who just lost their jobs. (There's some other common patterns in that vein too, e.g. "this is the hardest decision I've ever had to do".)
If you want to acknowledge being at fault, that's totally fine. Just write the facts. The over-hiring was a mistake, and you're the one who made that decision. Don't dress it up into a personal journey of failure and redemption.
The job of the C-suite is accurate forecasting which is why they make 400x what the line worker does in large companies. Obviously they don't have a crystal ball but if scaled up the company hugely during a black swan event like covid and assumed that was the new normal I'd be personally ashamed and would either resign or give back my salary for a year+ to keep most of those employees and find a function for them. Perhaps via retraining, perhaps with instituting optional pay cuts to let people work 4 days a week, etc.
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ECONOMIES require tech, regardless of industry, thus a growth in tech - even when there is a plateau in general economic growth....
They still need tech to advance, and adopting that advancement to remain competitive?
Or am I wrong?
This is just so short sighted from Jack and other such CEOs.
Raise large amounts of money Grow exponentially Have a sweet exit for the investors
Nothing that happened is surprising in this light. Even with a "nice" CEO and generous layoff terms, the simple issue is that the market for any given company can only ever be so big and the CEO doesn't get to choose "less growth" with investors breathing down their necks.
Investors in private and public businesses demand growth, so naturally executives will optimize for that. I'm currently at a Series B company that has a product, growing customer base, strong revenue, etc. and we're starting the Series C process. We've crafted a plan for responsible organic growth by investing in efficiency and growing lines of business with a lower cost to serve, but even in this environment, a significant number of investors are still looking for a "pump in the cash and grow fast" story.
This is a common part of the boom-bust cycle of many corporate firms. They use cheap money and labor to reposition / grow / etc., then when the work is done and wages start increasing, they cut back on staffing and reap the profits of their new position with a skeleton crew.
The letter says that the takeaway at the executive level is a greater emphasis on building an all-weather business.
But frankly, investors often don't want an all-weather business. Lattice is a venture-backed startup. Having an all-weather business means being more risk-averse than you otherwise could be, which limits growth in the good times. Investors want a company that can quickly shed excess weight during a recession and then quickly grow again when conditions are favorable. That's how you get the high growth that attracts VCs.
Something tells me that most CEOs who commit to running an all-weather business during this period of contraction will conveniently forget about it when times are better.
In fact, they may use similar justification, that their hands are tied. During the downturn, it's "We had to lay these people off to make sure the larger organization can survive," and during a bull market, it's, "We had to grow rapidly to secure additional funding, which is necessary to make sure the larger organization can survive."
This may be true for some investors, but the largest hedge fund in the world Bridgewater) is famous for their all-weather fund.
That means that those investors do exist.
If you take that into account, that means that they chose investors who do not want an all-weather company, and thereby gambled not only with their own personal well-being, but with other people's career's and incomes on a risky bet -- as the top comment said, it was obvious that these rates wouldn't stay the same.
The dichotomy of "higher risk vs higher reward", however, isn't as real as people feel it is. There are low-risk & high rewards style investing (it's the base premise of value investing, whether focused or not). VCs do not want you to lose their money, and so doing something that is predictably bad is not what they want.
They do want you to go for moonshots... but again, this is predictably bad. I think you'll be harder pressed to find a company that has continued to do well by over-hiring through pandemic times.
First google'd item on the subject: https://www.yahoo.com/video/warren-buffett-huge-structural-a...
Bingo.
It will be very interesting when the interest rates climb back down, to see how many CEO's will actually be hiring conservatively. One nice thing: we now have public documentation of their apology letters, so it will be quite a PR exercise to go back on their words. But I'm sure the consultants they hire will come up with the right kind of spin.
As a perennial negative Nancy, I'm pretty skeptical of this over "irrational exuberance". Every five to ten years everyone thinks that they are at the start of a brand new normal, where everything will be up and to the right forever, and then, oops that wasn't right.
People were being a little silly about the pandemic boom, we should just say that and not give out passes for being a part of the crowd.
So many of these startup aren't build around a solid sustainable business model but around an exit. Fuck the employees, fuck the customers, all leadership cares about is making it to an exit so they can all cash out. They all saw an opportunity to accelerate that cash out during the free money, everyone is a unicorn years, unfortunately most of them were never going to cash out and now that no one is throwing free money at them to keep their pipe dreams afloat, the employees and customers take the brunt of their greed while they waltz off to their next boondoggle.
Was it fear of being left out of the free-money-on-the-table if they didn't keep telling everyone growth would last forever, thus justifying investing more money in them to capitalize on that growth? I always have to keep in mind that public statements companies make are at least equal parts fire-for-effect as declaration of truth; they are bound by law to make some true statements, but they also pepper statements heavily with words chosen to illicit the desired behavior in investors (current and potential) and competitors.
"Money, it's a hit; Ah, don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit; I'm in the high-fidelity first class travelling set; And I think I need a Learjet"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpbbuaIA3Ds
In particular, I would say its not malicious, but just how society works. If you see your peers (other CEO's), the people you respect and report to (VC, investors) all saying similar things and nudging you to go in a specific direction, its easier to think you're on the right direction, easier to ignore signals that might point to the fact that your decision making is flawed.
The unfortunate truth is that they have the "excuse" that everyone around them was caught by surprise, so its "not their fault" (i.e. they're still a good leader) and investors will buy it. The people that lose out are the affected employees; they just need to be nice and polite, apologize profusely and move on, while its the employees that lose the most.
I suppose activist investors who pushed for aggressive growth strategies because of the FOMO environment will be losing a lot of money, but that's little comfort to the people losing their jobs.
Right, and I see little in the news about investors taking responsibility for misreading the market and losing value, all the fault appears to rest with the CEO's for hiring aggressively and for employees not being productive enough.
In a certain sense, I think we need more journalists that cover tech, so that we can get deep dives and some real answers. What we currently have is "journalists" whose main source of news is going to events/parties, socializing with the elite and then parroting their perspectives. There is very little "hard" journalism happening here, its more "access" journalism.
There seem to be some resemblances to religion here: the downturn indicates that the gods are angry, and must be appeased through sacrifices. The CEO acts as high priest, carrying out the sacrifice, absorbing the blame generated by it. That may seem like a far-fetched analogy, but there's a certain liturgy to the whole process.
It illustrates the popularized image of CEO as fully-realized alpha male who answers to no one is naive at best. Almost everyone has to answer to someone. And that definitely impacts how they make decisions.
Did you receive, or do you refute nepotistic investments/hires - irrespective of the success/failure of your company?
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Reddit has become a site that I will only ever lurk - after having an account for 16 YEARS... I will never create another account...
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Do you see these changes in Reddits favor? Or do you feel that Reddit has lost its vision, vs. supporting the path they are on?
I normally cringe at all the "I could build it in a weekend" posts here, but with Lattice I genuinely cannot understand what the 1000+ employees even do. Is there anything more to the company than the founder's last name and industry connections through his brother?
Also we stopped using it a few years ago, but for some reason over the past months, all our employees have been getting marketing spam from Lattice.
> While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place.
Protip: Have your own laptop for your own stuff – it'll save you from all kinds of headache down the line, and shield you from all kinds of potential risk
As someone that went through a similar 'just keep it' event. My personal laptop was already better, but my sister's sure as shit wasn't.
Seeing a lot of people shitting on the product in this comment forum. Plenty of their products are gimmicks, sure, but their real product is that they have a cult-following from the HR community, and they are better positioned to iterate and compete with more mainstream HR tools if they play their cards right. Lord knows they have way too many sales people (AKA "surplus elites"), and need to focus more on their product if they want to have something HR teams don't just want, but need, especially in this new macroeconomic condition. Hopefully the company can move on from this quickly. I don't think Jack is the kind of person who will fuck this opportunity up.
Wish I could email my priest instead of having to go into the confession booth each time.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/lattice-raises-175m-more-a...
This is the same marketcap as Asana now, which I would guess has much higher revenue figures than Lattice
Imagine writing that sentence!