Following on from sacking their entire security team last week, the CEO of Patreon today announced that they would be laying off a further 80 “team members”. They are completely closing their offices in Dublin and Berlin.
The reason given for these mass layoffs (this latest cull equals around 17% of the entire workforce at Patreon) is a mix of the changing “creator landscape”, and the economy following Covid.
How I arrived at this decision
Over the past decade, the Creator Economy has become one of the world’s most important movements. Tens of millions of people are now creators, and they reach billions of people with their work. A key problem, though, is that the underlying economic systems to help creators build their businesses were underdeveloped. Patreon started over 9 years ago to address this problem by designing a better way for creators to build stronger relationships with their communities and better businesses around their work.
Jack Conte, Patreon CEO
Jack has promised to give all those leaving at least three months severance; how much each former team member will get is based on how long they’ve been with the company and where in the world they are based. One “good” thing, at least for US leavers, is their health insurance will be provided until the end of the year.
You can find the full story in the blog post released this morning – https://blog.patreon.com/a-note-from-jack
I am fairly certain that Patreon is like other tech companies that expanded fast only to find that when there is an economic downturn it can not be sustained. This is especially true when there are other less restrictive platforms available to creators.
Losing business to Subscribestar?