Stripe to cut global workforce by around 14%, founding Collison brothers say

Digital payments company Stripe is to cut its global workforce by around 14%, its Irish founders have said.

In an email sent to staff, Limerick brothers, and founders of the company, Patrick and John Collison said the job cuts will see Stripe have about 7,000 employees.

It is not yet clear how many staff working in its Irish offices will be affected by the reduction, with the Collison brothers saying the job cuts will not be applied across the organisation.

In an email sent to staff on Thursday, Patrick and John said they “over-hired for the world we’re in”.

“Around 14% of people at Stripe will be leaving the company. We, the founders, made this decision,” they said.

“We over-hired for the world we’re in, and it pains us to be unable to deliver the experience that we hoped that those impacted would have at Stripe.

“There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to do our best to treat everyone leaving as respectfully as possible and to do whatever we can to help.”

The brothers said Stripe’s leadership made two “consequential mistakes”.

“In making these changes, you might reasonably wonder whether Stripe’s leadership made some errors of judgment. We’d go further than that,” they added.

“In our view, we made two very consequential mistakes, and we want to highlight them here since they’re important.

“We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.

“We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed co-ordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.

“We are going to correct these mistakes. So, in addition to the headcount changes described above (which will return us to our February headcount of almost 7,000 people), we are firmly reining in all other sources of cost.

“The world is hard to predict right now, but we expect that these changes will set us up for robust cash flow generation in the quarters ahead.

“We are not applying these headcount changes evenly across the organisation.”