Patreon founder and CEO, Jack Conte, announced a layoff at Patreon of 80 people. This comes after Patreon laid off at least five employees from its security engineering team. It certainly sounds like things are not going very well for Patreon.
In “A note from Jack”, CEO Jack Conte clarified what has happened within his company. The note was posted on September 13, 2022. It starts with “Today I announced a layoff at Patreon of 80 people, or about 17% of our teammates. Here is the note that I sent to the Patreon team about it earlier this morning.”
Here’s a little bit from Jack Conte’s note:
…Today we will lay off 80 Patreon teammates from our Go-to-Market, Operations, Finance, and People teams, with roughly 17% of our team leaving the company. Before I get into the reasons for this decision, I want to recognize that today will be difficult for much of our team and even harder for those leaving Patreon. Over the last 9 months, we’ve seen the tech industry – and the whole economy – change considerably. Many of you have asked me about layoffs at All Hands meetings as we’ve set out to tighten our focus, and I’ve said that layoffs would be a last resort. Today we are taking that step, and I am deeply sorry to the kind, talented, creator-first people who will be leaving Patreon…
Conte also wrote about the people in Patreon’s European offices:
…As part of these changes, we are closing our Dublin and Berlin offices, and continuing operations in Porto. In the case of Dublin, we are consolidating our engineering teams in the US to improve collaboration and efficiency, as nearly all of our engineering teammates are located in our US offices. We are offering our nine Dublin engineering teammates relocation packages to join these US-based teams.
In the case of Berlin, the office was solely focused on Sales and Marketing, and that’s one area where we’ve reduced our budgets in order to shift resources toward our product. Moving forward, we will adopt a more scaled approach to helping creators onboard, in which US-based teams will support multiple regions. We will be consolidating our marketing efforts to our US teams, focused on updating our brand, developing creator resources, and launching new products.
Our Support and Trust & Safety teams in Porto will continue to invest in one-on-one support for our creators and patrons in Europe, and moving forward, we will continue to translate our products, provide support in local languages, and cultivate a presence in Europe, but with a smaller geographic footprint.
It certainly sounds like things are not going very well for Patreon.
The Verge reported that Patreon’s laid-off workers in the US will receive three months’ severance pay as well as two extra weeks per half year of tenure they have beyond their first year at the company. European workers will get a similar deal, with three months of healthcare coverage, whereas Americans will get COBRA through the end of 2022.
According to The Verge, Patreon is closing two of its European offices and giving nine engineers in Ireland the option to relocate to the US.
To me, it sounds like the posting of Jack Conte’s note explains why the people from Patreon (Ellen Satterwhite, and Emily Metcalf) declined to answer questions after speaking with Gizmodo and TechCrunch. They needed wait to until the note went public.