Exclusive: Jack Dorsey’s Block plans more layoffs just days after cuts at Tidal
Two employees familiar with the plans said his company, which operates payments service Square, money transfer app CashApp and music streaming platform Tidal, is planning a second consecutive round of layoffs. in December. Luck. The cutoff date is currently set for next week, as well as the week of December 3, one person said, although that date could change if plans change. The people requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about company matters.
Sources said the number of employees expected to be affected by the planned cuts was significant, although the exact number could not be determined. Staff at Tidal, development platform TBD, and other parts of the company are expected to be cut.
A Block spokesman declined to comment.
Earlier this week, Block laid off multiple employees at Tidal, including eliminating all product management and product marketing roles, as well as Luck previously reported. Block acquired a majority stake in Tidal in 2021 for about $300 million. In an email to employees about the cuts at Tidal, Dorsey said the company needs to “rebuild like a startup.”
Dorsey only started working at Block about a year ago, around the time former Square CEO Alyssa Henry left the company after nearly a decade in various roles. Dorsey took the helm and has since made steady changes to the company, including multiple layoffs of more than 1,000 people, strict limits on hiring and headcount, and an end to improvement plans. employee performance and the closure of CashApp’s UK operations and the cancellation of the app’s international expansion plans.
“Our company’s growth has outpaced our business and revenue growth,” Dorsey said late last year in a note to employees. Around that time, he also wrote his first letter in several years to Block shareholders. The company’s shares are flat this year, because Nasdaq up nearly 22% and still about 70% below its 2021 peak. Growth in Square and CashApp, Block’s most important segments, began to slow, although Square returned to growth in most recent quarter.
Now, Dorsey thinks most companies should be led more by engineering and design teams, and intends to move the company closer to its early days as a small startup more, one person said.
Concept “founder mode,” the idea that company founders should run them, not outsiders hired over the years, is gaining traction in the tech world. The same is true of “efficiency,” which executives like Mark Zuckerberg and the CEO of Meta Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has been promoted over the past 18 months of deployment continuous dismissal aimed at improving the speed of their company’s operations.
The trouble for Dorsey, according to some of his Block employees, was that he went missing or seemed uninterested in the company for long periods of time before suddenly returning to take control. Before taking over from Henry, Dorsey was Block’s president and held the title of “Head of Block.”
“He is seen as an absent father who has just returned and expects his thousands of children to obey him,” said a person familiar with the matter. “He thought he could run a 12,000-person company like a startup. It was absolute chaos.”
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