His company, which operates payments service Square, money transfer app CashApp and music streaming platform Tidal, plans a second round of layoffs in December, two employees familiar with the plans said. luck. The date for the cuts is currently set for next week, as well as the week of Dec. 3, one of the people said, although that date could change if plans change. The people have asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak about company matters.
Sources say that the number of employees that will be affected by the planned reduction is significant, although the exact number is not available. Tidal employees, the TBD developer platform, and other parts of the company will reportedly be cut.
A spokesman for Block declined to comment.
Earlier this week, Block laid off several employees at Tidal, including eliminating all product management and product marketing roles. luck notify in advance. Block acquired a majority stake in Tidal in 2021 for around $300 million. In an email to employees about the cuts at Tidal, Dorsey said the company needed to “rebuild like a startup.”
Dorsey had an up-and-down tenure at Block about a year ago, following nearly a decade in various roles around the time Square’s former CEO Alyssa Henry left the company. Dorsey took the helm and has since made a steady stream of changes at the company, including multiple rounds of layoffs of more than 1,000 people, severely limiting hiring and headcount, ending plans to improve employee performance and canceling a planned shutdown of CashApp’s UK operations. meanwhile international expansion of the application.
“Our company’s growth has far outpaced our business and revenue growth,” Dorsey said in a memo to employees late last year. At that time, he also write his first letter to Block shareholders in several years. The shares of the company are the same this year, such as Nasdaq it rose nearly 22%, and remains about 70% lower than its 2021 high. Growth in Square and CashApp, Block’s most important segments, began to lag, although Square returned to growth. last quarter.
Now, Dorsey believes the bulk of the company should be run by the engineering and design teams, and plans to move the company’s operations closer to the startup, one of the people said.
notion “creative mode,” the idea that founders of companies should run them, not outsiders hired for years, is having a moment in tech circles. The same goes for “efficiency,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the alphabet It has been promoted by CEO Sundar Pichai over the last 18 months as they are being implemented continuous dismissals aimed at improving the speed at which their companies operate.
Dorsey’s problem, according to some of his Block employees, is that the company was either defunct or seemingly disinterested for long periods of time before suddenly returning to control. Before taking over from Henry, Dorsey was the president of the Block and held the title of “Block Head”.
“He is being referred to as an absentee father who has just returned and is expected to obey by thousands of his children,” said one person familiar with the matter. “He thinks he can start a company of 12,000 people like a new company. It was pure chaos.”
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