Plaid the latest fintech making cuts: Staff saw it coming
Another week, another group of fintechs make big cuts. So far, we’ve already had Bybit, Swyftx and Amber, but those were all Crypto firms. An arguably more surprising revelation came from banking integration platform Plaid who announced yesterday that they were laying off 20% of their workforce.
CEO Zach Perret issued a statement where he blamed the cuts of “approximately 260 talented Plaids”, on “macroeconomic changes”. Perrett said that “the current economic slowdown has meant revenue growth did not materialize as quickly as expected.”
Though the departments being cut were not specified, employees on Blind offered some insights. Security teams were stripped. Three members of an allegedly already understaffed security operations team were let go.
For some employees, the cuts were a foregone conclusion. Writing on Blind, one said: “exactly no one in the company is shocked by the layoffs.“ Why not? Plaid has seemingly been in a hiring freeze for months.
That's unfortunate because Plaid is a popular place to work. Reviews for the company on Glassdoor and Blind have been overwhelmingly positive with average scores of 4.7 and 4.5 stars respectively, but even among these positive reviews were seeds of doubt that might have been visible to a keen-eyed potential hire.
Reviews in November claimed that “business isn’t doing good.” One Plaid employee warned of the "deadweight" of “ a lot of folks coasting.”
Earlier this year, CTO Jean-Denis Greze claimed that the engineering team had increased over seventeen-fold in the last four years having started with around 20 engineers.
Even the employees who haven't been cut are in pain. In April 2021, Plaid was valued at $13.4bn. One employee pointed out that anyone who received stuck based on that valuation is now, "well underwater.”
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