View up the side of the East West Bank building in the Financial District neighborhood of San Francisco. Hero Digital downsized its footprint in the city in 2021, moving its headquarters into one of the building’s suites.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Hero Digital, a tech consulting company with private equity ownership, will no longer call San Francisco home.
The firm is shifting its headquarters to Chicago as part of an Aug. 14 merger with consulting firm Avionos, which is based in the Illinois city. The move caps off a tumultuous few years for Hero Digital, which does consulting, engineering and marketing work for clients like Comcast. In 2021, the company was sold from one private equity firm to another, and in January of this year, it replaced its founding CEO and bought another digital consulting company, Omnichannel Commerce — all amid a continuous stream of layoffs, former employees told SFGATE, including five substantial job cuts over the last year.
Four former Hero Digital employees, three of whom SFGATE granted anonymity in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy as they still work in the tech industry, said the firm had gradually cut down its Bay Area workforce to a fraction of its former size as it cut staff across the company.
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Mattie Van Gundy, a company spokesperson, said Hero Digital will keep an office and employees in San Francisco, though she did not specify how many staffers would stay based in the Bay Area.
According to John Burke, who worked at Hero Digital in San Francisco for eight years before he was laid off this month, the firm laid off at least 15 workers five times in the last year — in August 2022, October 2022, January 2023, April 2023 and early this August. The company’s website says the firm has 420 workers across its staff, but that number has not been updated since July 2021, the Wayback Machine shows. The layoffs had not previously been reported or announced.
Burke added that the firm went from having roughly 70 to 100 employees at a 150 Spear St. office in 2019, to most recently operating out of a suite on Montgomery Street with a maximum capacity of 25. Van Gundy confirmed to SFGATE that the move from Spear Street happened in 2021, along with a switch to a hybrid work model that helped the firm “adopt a global workforce.” She also said the Montgomery Suite office would be Hero Digital’s remaining presence in San Francisco.
Burke and two other former employees told SFGATE that the company has begun to rely more heavily on engineers based in Latin America.
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Two former workers told SFGATE that the layoffs hit so often they felt “continuous,” and that the job cuts didn’t seem to square with the firm’s high-profile hires of the new CEO and a new chief technology officer, or with leadership’s excited acquisition announcements.
When private equity firm CI Capital sold Hero Digital to AEA, an investment firm that was expanding its West Coast presence, in late 2021, the seller boasted that Hero Digital was on an acquisition spree, having “five strategic add-on acquisitions” in as many years.
The acquisitions — a common private equity strategy — served as a backdrop to layoffs, but so did the ebb and flow of available projects, two former employees said. The trend of mergers and acquisitions continued in 2023, as Hero Digital bought Omnichannel Commerce in January and merged with Avionos in August.
“Like all technology companies, we are consistently adapting our business to ensure we have the right services and talent mix to meet our clients’ ever-changing business needs,” Van Gundy told SFGATE on behalf of the firm.
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Hero Digital, founded in 2014, employs designers and engineers to work for clients in tech, banking and retail on project-based “customer experience” assignments, including a payment system for Comcast and a digital network for Universal Health Services. Employees often use products built by fellow Bay Area tech firms like Adobe, Salesforce and Sitecore.
Several tech firms have pulled their headquarters from the expensive Bay Area in recent years. In June, the struggling note-taking company Evernote laid off most of its staff as it prepared to centralize its operations in Europe for “operational efficiency.” That same week, mobile gaming company Skillz left San Francisco for Las Vegas, with its CEO saying that Vegas was the “obvious place” to be. Real Estate startup Belong left San Mateo for the “less ideological” Miami in 2022, and tech giant Oracle, citing a desire to give employees more flexibility, jumped ship from Redwood City to Austin in late 2020.
Hear of anything happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.