Robinhood, the stock-trading app that became synonymous with the pandemic-era’s retail-investing boom, is cutting 10% of its workforce and joining tech’s “Great Flattening.”
CEO Vlad Tenev told employees in a memo on Tuesday that the company’s business “has never been stronger,” but said Robinhood needed to become leaner as it scales. Tenev said the company was “flattening” its organizational structure and reducing head count to avoid becoming a “heavily-layered organization.”
He also wrote that the company will “continue hiring strategically,” while investing in “top-tier talent” and using “frontier technologies.”
Affected employees were being notified on Tuesday, Tenev said. The company declined to provide additional comment, and Robinhood didn’t specify what teams are affected by the cuts in the memo.
Robinhood is the latest to join tech’s “Great Flattening,” or the slashing of middle layers in an effort to reduce bureaucracy and move faster. In the wake of the pandemic-era hiring boom, several household-name companies — including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta — have thinned out management ranks and leaned into individual contributors as they make their org charts flatter.
Read the memo Robinhood’s CEO sent to staff:
Robinhoodies,
We’ve made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members today. Those departing are being notified, and we’re offering them full support through this transition, including severance. These are good people who helped build the foundation we stand on today, and I am deeply grateful for their contributions to Robinhood.
I want to be transparent about why this is happening now. Robinhood’s business has never been stronger. But to achieve the massive scale of our mission, we cannot default to operating as a heavily-layered organization. We must be a lean, hyper-focused team where every single individual is empowered to make a massive impact. Our execution is strong today, but our ambitions require us to continuously raise our own bar. To achieve that, today we are flattening our org structure and reducing our overall team size by 10% of headcount.
Because our financial position is strong, we are making this change proactively. The goal is to maximize our talent density and ensure that our culture is defined by an absolute elite performance bar and a superlative commitment to our customers. This transition creates even more opportunities for our most talented people to grow and take on greater responsibility. We will also continue hiring strategically, investing heavily in top-tier talent, and utilizing frontier technologies to push our execution even further.
I know it can be painful to say goodbye to teammates. It is the hardest consequence of committing uncompromisingly to our values of being “Lean & Disciplined” and demanding “High Performance.”