Plex, the free streaming app, laid off approximately 20% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned, which will affect all departments, including the Personal Media teams.
“This is by far the hardest decision we’ve had to make at Plex,” CEO Keith Valory said in a statement. “These are all wonderful people, great colleagues, and good friends. But we believe it is the right thing for the long-term health and stability of Plex.”
The streaming app gives users a single destination to upload and organize content (video, audio and photos) from their own server while also allowing them to stream it via mobile app, smart TV or desktop.
In recent years, however, Plex has invested in free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) and live TV offerings. The FAST market has become saturated as many companies have entered the space. Plus, the overall advertising industry has taken a hit, making it harder for companies to earn enough revenue.
Valory noted in his statement that the company was significantly impacted by the slowdown. “While we adjusted our business plan last year after the shift in equity markets to get us back on a path to profitability without having to cut personnel expenses, the downturn in the ad market in Q2 put significantly more pressure on our business and ultimately it became clear that we would need to take additional measures in order to maintain a confident path to profitability within the next 18 months,” he said.
He added that the company is still expected to see 30% growth this year.
According to a Slack message from Valory, obtained by The Verge, which first reported the layoffs, Valory noted that 37 employees would be impacted.
Additionally, it seems that Plex may have had another round of layoffs earlier this year. Five months ago, a former account executive posted on LinkedIn that they were “affected by company layoffs.”
As of January, the company had 175 employees, and its revenue was in the double-digit millions.
Updated 6/29/23 at 12:10 p.m. ET with a statement from CEO.
There’s so much projection in here it’s too much to reasonably unravel.
You aren’t entitled to a job in perpetuity. From what I can tell no one has been perp walked and that rarely happens with layoffs unless you give them a reason to. Most want to make it as amicable as possible.
Also, its not reasonable to think the CEO of plex taking a 20% paycut would offset 20% of the workforce. Those aren’t even equitable comparisons. In fact he seems to have pretty forward thinking opinions on hiring
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-distributed-workforces-win-keith-valory
I don’t know what he makes and don’t really care to look it up. But the rest is jsut crazy. Plex has taken risks across the board, they may not be working out.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067901/plexs-bold-plan-to-take-on-the-streaming-goliaths
And now that the market has turned funding is drying up, which they have relied on
https://www.fastcompany.com/90625189/plex-funding-streaming-new-features
What’s your solution?
Like having an office manager tell you to gtfo, instead of the CEO who was "deeply sorry" for all this, or calling everyone to the floor, reading off a list of names, and then saying "If you heard your name, this is your last day with the company", or the people who find out by not being able to access their work accounts (google, outlook, slack, whatever). Sure is amicable.
It all smacks of the same energy Spez gave off when he's "listening to people's concerns" while demodding people right and left and being unwilling to budge on the amazingly arbitrary API cut off.
Layoffs indicate one thing and one thing only: the leadership made some wrong choices along the way, and so they're going to step on the people that had no input into the process that got them there, so they, the people who made those bad choices, can stick around and continue to make more bad bets. No amount of "mercy" or "empathy" can ameliorate the fact that they're screwing other people over in their own interests.
A key example of this is that in virtually every single layoff severance package, they never move the vesting cliff forwards. Been there less than a year and not at your 25% cliff? Guess what, those n months you spent are worth fuck all. If they were as sorry and merciful as they claim they were, they'd move the cliff up and give you the appropriate percentage of your options. Laid off 2 months before your cliff? Cool, here you go, you get 20.75% of your total (assuming 4 years with 1 year being 25%) vesting package. But no, they just take those shares from you as if they had fired you, because thats all a layoff really is: mass firings
And the people that mass fire people to save their own asses aren't entitled to sympathy. They are the bad guy in this situation.
Since you asked for some things that make laying off people less shitty for the people who actually suffer and not the "poor" CEOs, here's some low cost things you can do that don't fuck people over quite as much. Shopify did some of these when they had to cut workforce:
None of that sounds too egregious, yet its almost never done by the "deeply sympathetic" leadership.