Hey Siri, when does a “macro-recession” become a “recession”?
It was another dismal week for startups amid dismal tech stocks and even worse crypto prices. But let’s start with some good news: Children can be vaccinated against COVID-19!
Back to the bad news: We’re writing again weekly ax pillarbecause again, there’s been enough bad news this week that you need to round it all up.
This week, startups in the crypto and real estate sectors performed exceptionally badly – naturally, like Mortgage rates riseFewer people want to buy a house. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is dangerously close to the $20,000 mark, a drastic drop from the $60,000 or more price we saw just 7 months ago (I was told on Twitter that # ItsNotAllAboutPrices).
Unfortunately, this week’s layoffs extend beyond those two areas, with consumer technology, fintech and food delivery also affected.
Let’s start with real estate
Our own Mary Ann Azevedo has tracked the real estate tech sector, reporting on Tuesday that publicly traded real estate brokerage platforms Red fins and Compass lay off one combined 900 employees.
“I’ve been told we won’t fire people unless we have to,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “We will have to.”
Redfin offers furloughed employees 10 weeks of base pay, plus an additional week of pay for each year of service, capped at 15 weeks. They will also be paid the cost of three months of company health care so they can temporarily continue coverage.
In addition to cutting 450 jobs, or 10% of employees, Compass will suspend hiring and mergers and acquisitions for the rest of the year.
San Francisco-based rental platform Zumper also cut back 15% of its 300 employees, which largely influenced the arts, sales and customer service departments, according to The Real Deal. Earlier this month, another Bay Area brokerage, Edge, cut 10% of its employees also.
Despite this radical change, some companies are still struggling to follow. Proptech Company Home page lift up 60 million dollars and acquisition lending startup Accept.inc this week.
Pain on blockchain
Coinbase is in slow decline, mentally depressed. After a hiring freeze followed by the controversial cancellation of accepted offers, the crypto exchange Announcement this week that it will reduce the workforce by 18%.
Remember when we said layoffs are a little more bearable when you’re not a fool for your employees? I regret to inform you that the higher ups of Coinbase may not have read my work.
In a letter to employees, CEO Brian Armstrong said that laid-off employees will be notified of their status via personal email – they will have their company accounts immediately cut off to protect their data. whether sensitive.
Yes, angry former employees can retaliate by leaking such information. But you know how to make them even worse? Cut them off from their work account without warning and let them know they no longer have a job.
Coinbase had 1,250 employees in early 2021, as the NFT craze ushered in a new wave of crypto entrants. Since then, the team has more than quadrupled.
“There have been new use cases enabled by crypto that get actual traction on a weekly basis,” Armstrong explain. “While we’ve done our best to make this moderate, in this case it’s clear to me that we’ve been over-hiring.”
Armstrong also added that introducing new employees has made the team less productive in recent months.
Coinbase is offering 14 weeks of severance pay to affected employees, plus two weeks for each year of employment after one year. The foundation will also offer four months of COBRA health coverage in the US and four months of mental health support for international employees.
The crypto layoffs don’t end there. Exchanges that depend on trading fees are losing their income because of the recession. The 3 billion dollars Cryptocurrency lending platform BlockFi cut 20% of its employees around 850 – less than two years ago, the blockchain startup had just 150 employees. Crypto.com also laid off 5% of the workforce or 260 employees (in the meantime, Crypto.com has committed $700 million in 20 years for the naming rights to the Staples Center…). Final, Huobi Thailand To be shutting down in July due to government licensing issues.
Consumer technology got a hit too
While Spotify has yet to proceed with layoffs, CEO Daniel Ek tells employees that the streaming giant will 25% slow recruitment, citing market uncertainty. So far this year, Spotify has been shut down live sound creation fund and cut its internal podcast group, Studio 4affects about 15 jobs.
As a WordPress design tool Elementor consumer technology? It saved me a few times, so let’s go with it. Just last week, Elementor acquired Strattic, which converts WordPress sites into Jamstack, a newer web development architecture. However, citing “inflation rising and recession pending,” Elementor co-founder and CEO Yoni Luksenberg announced that the company will be laying off 15% of its workforce, mainly in marketing department.
That brings us to ByteDance – don’t worry, TikTok is fine. Three years ago, TikTok’s parent company was based in China purchased Mokun Technology, an online game developer. 101 Studio, part of that acquisition, closed this week, cut about 150 employees, suggested another 150 workers in the studio to transfer money internally. This marks a setback in ByteDance’s race against Tencent to dominate mobile gaming.
And still, still more
TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo report:
Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple, which was valued at $4 billion last year, is laying off 159 people – or about 13% of the company’s employees. The Toronto-based company has led the way in democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales, and peer-to-peer remittances. And now it looks like Wealthsimple is an example of another company that went through a boom in the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business.
Mary Ann also reported a 25% workforce reduction affecting 110 employees in Notarized, a startup that provides remote online notarization services. Of course, this startup boomed at the beginning of the pandemic, but now, the demand for online notarization is not high.
Our own Christine Hall shared the news about JOKRan on-demand food delivery company, leave the US focus on the Latin American market.
Christine wrote:
Food delivery companies are facing tough times as capital dries up and the rush to invest in the sector, in part as a result of the global pandemic, has made it quite inflationary. and is a natural thing. This became apparent when some of JOKR’s competitors began to announce staff layoffs. For example, in May, Gopuff, Gorillas and Getir Notice of layoffs.
TechCrunch took a deeper look What’s happening in the on-demand delivery space? earlier this month and what it means for the industry going forward.
