Robinhood Cut Nearly 1 in 3 Staff Members
The self-described “democratized finance” app at the center of last year’s so-called meme stock frenzy has struggled to recover ever since its disastrous IPO, which Bloomberg estimated was among the worst debut for any company of its size. Now, in 2022 the company’s employees, whom executives refer to as “Robinhooders,” are feeling the pain.
In late April, CEO and founder Vlad Tenev announced the company would cut around 9% of its workforce following a period of “hyper-growth,” in 2020 and 2021. It turns out those cuts were a sign of what was to come. In the first week of August, Tenev wrote another blog post, this time announcing a much larger layoff affecting 23% of the workforce. The dramatic cuts came just hours after the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it had fined the company’s cryptocurrency division for “significant anti-money-laundering, cybersecurity, and consumer protection violations.”
