Patreon is laying off yet another batch of its employees.
The popular creator subscription company has recently announced it is laying off 17% of its workforce while closing its offices in two European countries due to unsustainable growth following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.
Patreon's recent layoffs follow its confirmation that it is dismissing five employees from its security team, though there are reports saying that the company decided to release everyone from it.
Patreon Lay-Off Details
Patreon CEO and co-founder Jack Conte mentioned in the layoffs announcement that the company has decided to lay off 80 of its employees from its Go-to-Market, Operations, Finance, and People teams.
This amount means the company is letting go of around 17% of its workforce.
As a result of these layoffs, the company has decided to close its Dublin and Berlin offices, with Conte explaining that the company decided to close these offices to streamline where Patreon's resources go.
In the case of the Dublin office, Patreon wants to consolidate its engineering team to improve their collaboration and efficiency, as nearly all of them are located in its US offices.
Meanwhile, Patreon decided to close its Berlin office to adopt a more scaled approach to helping creators abroad, meaning that its US-based teams will soon support multiple regions.
Patreon has a good reason to close its Berlin office - it is exclusively focused on Sales and Marketing, which is an area Patreon has reduced its budget to shift its resources toward its products.
Why Is Patreon Laying Off Employees?
The Verge reports that Patreon decided to initiate the layoffs due to it changing its plans following its rapid growth during the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tech Crunch previously reported in late December 2021 that Patreon's chief product officer, Julian Gutman, is planning to double in size by the end of 2022 thanks to its rapid growth and the $155 million it raised from venture funding.
To streamline its spending, Patreon decided to reduce the size of its teams in charge of "operations, recruiting, and other internal support functions," including Sales and Marketing.
This list may have included the company's security team as it also laid off five security team members on Sept. 9, per Emily Metcalfe's LinkedIn post.
Metcalfe is Patreon's now former senior security engineer who only stayed at the company for ten months since her first day in Nov. 2021.
Patreon eventually confirmed the layoffs of its security team members, with its US policy head Ellen Satterwhite confirming it in a statement to Tech Crunch.
Though Satterwhite did not mention if Patreon did let go of its own security team or how many members the team has, it did reveal that the company is working with external organizations to "develop our security capabilities and conduct regular security assessments."
Conte mentioned in his recent announcement that the layoffs for its security team were part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities to its engineering team. It would also allow Patreon to bring in "new areas of expertise into Patreon internally, and continue partnering with external experts."
