Robinhood is the latest company to announce layoffs, with co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev announcing the move in a blog post.
Like many companies, Robinhood is beginning to feel the impact of a changing economy. The platform was built around making it easy for everyday users to invest in their favorite stocks. With a downturn, however, people have less disposable income for investing.
As a result of the downturn, Tenev says the company will lay off approximately 23% of its workforce.
As part of a broader company reorganization into a General Manager (GM) structure, I just announced that we are reducing our headcount by approximately 23%. While employees from all functions will be impacted, the changes are particularly concentrated in our operations, marketing, and program management functions.
Tenev acknowledges this is far more than was initially announced earlier this year.
Earlier this year, I announced that we would be letting go of 9% of our workforce and focusing on greater cost discipline throughout the organization. This did not go far enough.
Tenev made it clear that he takes responsibility for the situation, saying he approved of decisions that were based on an assumed economic trajectory that didn’t happen.
Last year, we staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022. In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate. As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory – this is on me.
Robinhood’s CEO is the second to so clearly take responsibility for decisions that didn’t work out and ultimately led to layoffs. Shopify’s CEO had a similar message when announcing job cuts in late July.
