Throwaway account since I currently work at Hubspot. We all received an email at 1pm Irish time this morning announcing the layoffs. US employees were told via email 15 minutes later if they were getting fired or not. Ireland (and other countries I believe) have to go through a different process for legal reasons. We now have to spend the next 3 weeks waiting basically to find out if we have jobs or not.
Tough break for all the people at HubSpot who are losing their jobs. I worked there and it was a truly remarkable place to work. I made some of my best friends in life and learned some really valuable lessons.
It says there was a business slow down. However, it did not say how much, if they were losing revenue, or why they didn't have a plan for this. [This implies that their business people understands the nature of the business and can comprehend that low periods happen in the business]
Also, the article states their stock is down, is this a free falling business or do they have a plan of attack to deliver value to their customers? (Rather than attempting to show good numbers via reduced staff)
HubSpot is best in class at marketing and CRM. It's delivering a lot of value, the growth numbers just aren't as good as they used to be. It boomed in 2021 and then tapered off in 2022
I think the parent is noting that there is a rush for every tech company to taper staff via layoffs right now. However it's unclear if the 7% layoff materially affects HubSpot's trajectory. HubSpot listed a 100MM dollar outlay for restructuring expenses. If they had simply maintained a hiring freeze for the next year would they have ended up in a materially different spot?
These 7% layoffs seem somewhat dubious from a business value perspective, the growing consensus is that this is actually about employer vs. employee control. Alternative explanation is that interest rates are about to beak 6% at which point it doesn't make much sense to be invested in any money losing tech firm.
