Clubhouse cuts staff by over half

Clubhouse is a special app that lets people talk to each other and listen to interesting conversations. But, because of COVID and people being busy, not as many people are using it as before. The people who made the app decided to make some changes to make it better, but it was too hard to do with so many people working there. So they decided to let some of the workers go and have a smaller team working on making the app better. It was a tough decision, but they think it will help them make the app even more fun for people to use in the future.

April 28, 2023473 views0

Social audio app Clubhouse has laid off more than half of its staff due to changes in customer habits in a post-COVID world and complexities associated with remote work. According to an official blog post, the decision was made by the startup’s co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth.

This, as per a TechCrunch report, comes less than a year after the company laid off a portion of its staff as part of another restructuring. While Clubhouse declined to provide details on the exact number of employees affected by the recent layoffs, it’s worth noting that in October of last year, co-founder Davison had revealed to TechCrunch that the social audio app had close to 100 employees at the time.

“It works really well when your friends are on the product and you have the time to meet up. Millions of people in our core community know this. But as the world has opened up post-Covid, it’s become harder for many people to find their friends on Clubhouse and to fit long conversations into their daily lives. To find its role in the world, the product needs to evolve. This requires a period of change,” the blog post read.

“Rohan and I have tried to make this work with our current team size, but we haven’t been able to do it effectively. It’s difficult for us to communicate the strategy to cross-functional teams when it’s evolving by 1% each day, or to make quick changes when each surface is owned by a different product squad. Being remote has made this especially challenging for us. The end result is that it’s hard for teams to coordinate, people feel blocked by us, and brilliant, creative people are left underutilized,” it further said.

“In order to fix this we need to reset the company, eliminate roles and take it down to a smaller, product-focused team. We arrived at this conclusion reluctantly, as we have years of runway remaining and do not feel immediate pressure to reduce costs. But we believe that a smaller team will give us focus and speed, and help us launch the next evolution of the product,” it said.

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