Eyeball test with zero context, but honestly? I doubt a 17% layoff will cut deep enough.
That still leaves them with more than 4x the employees they had in 2020 (when the product had already reached massive scale and, IMO, very high quality):
> “We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,” Citron wrote. “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.”
I know someone always makes a comment about "wow, X company had Y000 employees? what do they even do all day?", and I don't wanna be glib, but it really does seem like they expanded beyond any kind of reasonable measure.
If I were at Discord, and I wasn't part of an extremely core team with a direct line to revenue generation, I would be sharpening up my resume.
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Edit: Okay, I missed this:
> Discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in funding. It has more than $700 million in cash on its balance sheet and the goal to become profitable this year
That's actually a lot better than I expected. Clearly they are making non-trivial revenue, and still have quite a bit of cash; maybe keeping a still-pretty-high headcount to pursue new monetization projects is the right call.
That still leaves them with more than 4x the employees they had in 2020 (when the product had already reached massive scale and, IMO, very high quality):
> “We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,” Citron wrote. “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.”
I know someone always makes a comment about "wow, X company had Y000 employees? what do they even do all day?", and I don't wanna be glib, but it really does seem like they expanded beyond any kind of reasonable measure.
If I were at Discord, and I wasn't part of an extremely core team with a direct line to revenue generation, I would be sharpening up my resume.
---
Edit: Okay, I missed this:
> Discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in funding. It has more than $700 million in cash on its balance sheet and the goal to become profitable this year
That's actually a lot better than I expected. Clearly they are making non-trivial revenue, and still have quite a bit of cash; maybe keeping a still-pretty-high headcount to pursue new monetization projects is the right call.