On: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

[dustinmoris]

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin:

https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947

https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993

> Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering

> Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody

> Not really clear to me how the execs think this company will be able to make money from now on

[smrtinsert → dustinmoris]

That says a lot. German labor laws protect their citizens strongly. I'm pretty sure they would always choose to get rid of other country staff first.

[cagataygurturk → smrtinsert]

Not only citizens, laws protect all workers

[aianus → smrtinsert]

More likely the German engineers cost half as much as the New York ones. No health insurance and much lower CoL and market rates.

[scott_karana → aianus]

I think you're probably right about overall cost, but just a note: German employers do pay into the health insurance pools, too.

[johnnyfaehell → smrtinsert]

Yes but operational reasons such as we can't afford to pay them falls under a fair reason. Only issue could be they would have to a certain amount of notice, so it could be more costly.

[shallot_router → dustinmoris]

It doesn't sound like they plan on running the company for very much longer.

[tw352852 → shallot_router]

This seems likely to me. Apparently the office staff and HR teams are down to 1 person each. Previously it was about 10-15 people.

[bm1362 → dustinmoris]

I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was <6 months and we just moved into a new space. The numbers seemed good to me.

The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.

[tw352852 → bm1362]

I did the back of the napkin math, and saw this coming a year ago. The numbers just didn't work out.

When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.

I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.

[neak → bm1362]

How was it going with the Go launch? I've been dealing with it on the b2b end and it has been pretty painful.

[pje → bm1362]

thanks for your kind words, "bm1362". we'll meet again.

[Shivetya → dustinmoris]

have someone lined up to buy them and removing duplicated jobs to make themselves more appealing?

[wumpus → Shivetya]

Normally such layoffs are made when an acquisition closes.

[rhizome → wumpus]

They're done in preparation as well, in order to juke the burn rate numbers by reducing overhead. Make no mistake, an acquisition would likely result in further cuts (acq is always bad for the little guy) if not a complete wind-down, but cutting staff historically does make a company more attractive to acquirers.

[sanj → dustinmoris]

I'm also hiring in New York for Time Out. I would like to think that engineers from Sound Cloud may be excited by the music, theater, film, and event domain. Drop me a line at [hn_username]@timeout.com