Block chief Jack Dorsey isn’t done with layoffs.
His company, which operates payments service Square, money transfer app CashApp, and music streaming platform Tidal, plans its second round of successive layoffs into December, two employees familiar with the plans told Coins2Day. The date of the cuts is currently set for next week, as well as the week of December 3, one of the people said, although dates could change should plans shift. The people asked to be kept anonymous as they aren’t authorized to speak about company matters.
The number of employees expected to be impacted by the planned cut is said by the sources to be significant, although an exact number could not be ascertained. Employees at Tidal, developer platform TBD, and other parts of the company are said to be in for cuts.
A spokeswoman for Block declined to comment.
Earlier this week, Block laid off scores of employees at Tidal, including the elimination of all product management and product marketing roles, as Coins2Day previously reported. Block acquired a majority stake in Tidal in 2021 for about $300 million. In an email to staff about the cuts at Tidal, Dorsey said the company needed to “build like a startup again.”
Dorsey only became noticeably hands-on at Block roughly a year ago, around the time former CEO of Square Alyssa Henry left the company following nearly a decade in various roles. Dorsey took over leadership and has since made steady changes to the company, including multiple rounds of layoffs of more than 1,000 people, strictly capping hiring and headcount, ending employee performance improvement plans, and closing the operations of CashApp in the U.K. While cancelling a planned international expansion of the app.
“The growth of our company has far outpaced the growth of our business and revenue,” Dorsey said late last year in a note to staff. Around that time, he also wrote his first letter in several years to Block shareholders. The company’s stock is flat this year, as Nasdaq soared nearly 22%, and it remains about 70% lower than a 2021 high. Growth in Square and CashApp, Block’s most important segments, started to lag, although Square returned to growth in the most recent quarter.
Now, Dorsey thinks most of the company should be led more by engineering and design teams, and is intent on bringing the operations of the company closer to its early days as a smaller startup, one of the people said.
The notion of “founder mode,” the idea that founders of companies should run them, not outsiders hired over the years, is having a moment in tech circles. The same is true of “efficiency,” which executives like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai have promoted over the last 18 months while implementing continual layoffs aimed at improving the speed at which their companies operate.
The trouble for Dorsey, according to some of his Block employees, is that he was either missing or seemingly disinterested by the company for a long time before his abrupt return to control. Before taking over from Henry, Dorsey was Block’s chairperson and held the title of “Block Head.”
“He’s referred to as the absentee dad that just came back and expects his thousands of kids to obey him,” one of the people familiar with the matter said. “He thinks he can operate a 12,000 person company like a start up. It’s been pure chaos.”
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