Stripe eliminated 300 positions, or roughly 3.5% of its staff, primarily in operations, engineering, and product development.
TakeAway Points:
- Stripe has laid off 300 employees, or roughly 3.5% of its staff.
- The business says it is “not slowing down hiring,” and by the end of the year, it intends to increase its workforce by 17%.
- Meta’s Facebook, Elon Musk’s X, Google’s YouTube and other tech companies have agreed to do more to tackle online hate speech.
Stripe cuts 300 staff
The payments company, valued at about $70 billion in the private markets, still expects to increase headcount by 10,000 by the end of the year, which would be a 17% increase, and is “not slowing down hiring,” according to a memo to staff from Chief People Office Rob McIntosh. Business Insider reported earlier on the cuts and the memo.
A Stripe spokesperson also confirmed to CNBC that a cartoon image of a duck with text that read, “US-Non-California Duck,” was accidentally attached as a PDF to emails sent to some of the employees who were laid off. Some of the emails mistakenly provided affected employees with an incorrect termination date, the spokesperson said.
McIntosh sent a follow-up email to staffers apologizing for the “notification error” and “any confusion it caused.”
“Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes,” he wrote.
In 2022, Stripe cut roughly 1,100 jobs, or 14% of its workers, downsizing alongside most of the tech industry, as soaring inflation and rising interest rates forced companies to focus on profits over growth. The Information reported that Stripe had a few dozen layoffs in its recruiting department in 2023.
Stripe’s valuation sank from a peak of $95 billion in 2021 to $50 billion in 2023, before reportedly rebounding to $70 billion last year as part of a secondary share sale. The company ranked third on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
In October, Stripe agreed to pay $1.1 billion for crypto startup Bridge Network, whose technology is focused on making it easy for businesses to transact using digital currencies.
Brothers Patrick and John Collison, who founded Stripe in 2010, have intentionally steered clear of the public markets and have given no indication that an offering is on the near-term horizon. Total payment volume at the company surpassed $1 trillion in 2023.
Facebook, X, and YouTube to fight online hate speech
Meta’s Facebook, Elon Musk’s X, Google’s YouTube and other tech companies have agreed to do more to tackle online hate speech under an updated code of conduct that will now be integrated into EU tech rules, the European Commission said on Monday.
Other signatories to the voluntary code set up in May 2016 are Dailymotion, Instagram, Jeuxvideo.com, LinkedIn, Microsoft hosted consumer services, Snapchat, Rakuten Viber, TikTok and Twitch.
“In Europe there is no place for illegal hate, either offline or online. I welcome the stakeholders’ commitment to a strengthened code of conduct under the Digital Services Act (DSA),” EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen said in a statement.
The DSA requires tech companies to do more to combat illegal and harmful content on their platforms. Compliance with the updated code could impact regulators’ enforcement of the Act, EU officials said.
Under the revised code, the companies pledged to allow not-for-profit or public entities with expertise on illegal hate speech to monitor how they review hate speech notices and to assess at least two-thirds of these notices received from them within 24 hours.
The companies will also take measures, such as using automatic detection tools to reduce hate speech on their platforms, and provide information on the role of recommendation systems and the organic and algorithmic reach of illegal content prior to its removal.
They will present country-level data broken down by the internal classification of hate speech such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.
