Airtable Loses 20% of Staff and Key Leadership

Airtable, a glitzy collaborative workflow platform used by organizations, including many newsrooms, announced it would layoff around 20% of its staff, including several key leadership roles. Specifically, according to TechCrunch, the layoffs will impact 254 employees spread out across the company’s business development and engineering teams, amongst others. The company’s chief revenue officer, chief people officer, and chief product officer also reportedly left the company.

“We’ve rapidly expanded and executed on multiple fronts,” CEO Howie Liu said in an email seen by TechCrunch. “At the time, I believed we could successfully pursue all of them in parallel. “However, in taking a hard look at our efforts in the current market environment, we’ve identified the teams best positioned to capture the opportunity in enterprise in order to bring complete focus, alignment and accountability in our execution.”

There’s never a great time for layoffs but Airtable’s round of cuts comes at a particularly embarrassing moment. Just days prior to the layoff decision, the company published a blog postabout how laid off tech workers could utilize Airtable’s software to help them find new jobs.

“It’s nice to know that it [an Airtable list of jobs] is useful and that it might actually help somebody land the job they’re looking for,” Inventables Senior Manager Brianna Doe said in the post. “It’s really hard to see so many people getting laid off.”