FILE: A passenger waiting to board his plane walks in front of a sign advertising Twilio at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2018.
Robert Alexander/Getty ImagesTwilio and Spotify joined a rough cohort of tech standouts Monday, with each company announcing its third layoff round in less than 15 months.
San Francisco-based Twilio, which makes communications software, is laying off 5% of its workforce, according to a letter including in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company reported having 5,905 employees as of Sept. 30, after an 11% layoff round in September 2022 and another 17% cut last February. Monday’s round was the smallest cut but will still hit almost 300 workers.
Spotify, meanwhile, announced its largest layoff of the year Monday. The Sweden-based music giant, which has an office in San Francisco’s Financial District, announced in a blog post that it would be laying off 17% of its workforce. Spotify previously cut 6% of staff in January and 2% in June, totaling about 800 jobs, per CNBC.
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Monday’s job cuts, which come just a week after the streamer’s massive Spotify Wrapped campaign opened, will leave about 1,500 more out of work, company spokesperson Rosa Oh told SFGATE.
Both of the tech giants’ CEOs discussed high spending and the need to cut costs in their memos to staff explaining the cuts. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson wrote that his company’s investments in its customer data platform, Segment, hadn’t paid off. The company is also laying off workers from its sales product Flex.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, speaks at the Future of Audiobooks Event on Oct. 3, 2023, in New York City.
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for SpotifyDaniel Ek, who heads Spotify, told workers that the company has been “more productive but less efficient,” with any increased productivity coming thanks only to increased resources. Spotify invested heavily in 2020 and 2021 in “team expansion, content enhancement, marketing, and new verticals,” Ek wrote, including on podcast studios and stars, but “we now find ourselves in a very different environment.”
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“While we have done some work to mitigate this challenge and become more efficient in 2023, we still have a ways to go before we are both productive and efficient,” Ek wrote. “Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact.”
Both companies declined to answer a request for comment from SFGATE about how many of the layoffs were in the Bay Area.
Hear of anything happening at Twilio, Spotify or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.