Patreon laid off 93 employees, totaling 20 percent of its workforce on Thursday morning, according to an email to creators and staff from CEO Jack Conte.
In a message sent to everyone on the platform signed up as a creator, and posted to the site, with the subject line “A Painful Update about our Team,” Conte wrote that the business is “healthy and strong” and that the core business of Patreon is not changing.
Conte included the email sent to Patreon employees in the message. In the email, he wrote that the company is undergoing both a “workforce reduction” and is “changing our organizational structure and how we work.” Specifically, he wrote, this means “we’re flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.”
Conte is careful in this email to both express that he doesn’t view AI as a replacement for the human creativity the platform is built on and profits from — devoting a section of the email to saying as much — and also that AI is fundamentally “transforming” the tech industry, noting that it has an impact on how the company operates.
“To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” Conte wrote. “The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply. That’s my personal opinion, but more importantly, it’s the foundation of Patreon’s strategy: our product vision and business are both predicated on the value of human creativity and human connection. AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.”
Earlier this month, Patreon announced that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models. “I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Conte wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.” The company later elaborated on the partnership in a blog post.
Included in the internal email shared publicly are severance details for laid-off workers, including 16 weeks of pay, remaining on payroll through the company’s August 20 vesting date, one additional week of pay for every full year worked at the company, additional cash payments for recent hires who haven’t reached their one-year cliff, healthcare coverage through the end of the year for eligible employees and families, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptops.
