Patreon is laying off 17 percent of its workforce and closing offices

Patreon is laying off 80 people, around 17 percent of its workforce, and closing offices in Dublin and Berlin. A post from CEO and co-founder Jack Conte says that the cuts are happening because the company is changing its plans after trying to rapidly grow during the pandemic. It’s reducing the size of its teams in charge of “operations, recruiting, and other internal support functions” as well as its budget for sales and marketing.

The layoffs are hitting Patreon’s go-to-market, operations, finance, and people teams. Workers in the US will receive three months’ severance pay as well as two extra weeks per half year of tenure they have beyond their first year at the company. European workers get a similar deal, with three months of healthcare coverage, whereas Americans will get COBRA through the end of 2022. Conte says he’ll be hosting “multiple Q&A sessions” to address the decision.

In addition to the layoffs, Patreon is closing two of its European offices and giving nine engineers in Ireland the option to relocate to the US.

Tuesday’s changes come after Patreon laid off its five-person security team last week. At the time, the company’s US policy head Ellen Satterwhite told The Verge the change would “have no impact on our ability to continue providing a secure and safe platform for our creators and patrons.” Conte addressed the matter of security in his Tuesday post as well, saying that the previous layoffs were “part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team.” He also reiterated that the company was continuing to work with external security experts and said that the new approach will increase how much Patreon invests in keeping the platform safe.

Patreon is far from the only company laying off employees amid concerns about the economy and rising inflation. Earlier this month, Snap cut around 20 percent of its workforce and canceled its original shows and other projects. Netflix, Wayfair, Rivian, Ford, Tesla, Shopify, Peloton, and a host of crypto companies have also laid off hundreds, and even thousands, of people this summer.