Clubhouse Is Laying Off 50 Per Cent Staff. This Is What Its Founders Told Employees

Weeks after Reddit pulled the plug on Clubhouse clone Talk, the original social audio app Clubhouse is laying off 50 per cent of its employees.

Impacted Clubhouse staff will receive severance and continued healthcare coverage for the next few months.

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Weeks after Reddit pulled the plug on Clubhouse clone Talk, the original social audio app Clubhouse is laying off 50 per cent of its employees. Joining other tech firms in laying off employees, Clubhouse founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth sent a note to company employees, announcing scaling back the strength.

"Today we announced that we’re scaling back our org by over 50% and saying goodbye to many talented, dedicated teammates in the process. We’re deeply sorry to be doing this, and we would not be making this change if we didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary," Davidson and Seth wrote in an email to employees.

Clubhouse founders noted that those who are among the impacted will receive a calendar invite to a 1:1 meeting with a manager in their department within the "next 10 minutes".

"In the meantime, we wanted to provide everyone with more context around why we made this decision and how we will be supporting the individuals who are departing," the Clubhouse founders added.

Clubhouse to provide severance and healthcare to laid-off staff

Those impacted will receive severance and continued healthcare coverage for the next few months.

"We will pay salaries for the rest of April, plus 4 months of additional severance for all departing employees. This means everyone affected will receive their full salary until Aug 31, 2023," said Davison and Seth.

"We will allow everyone who is impacted to keep their company-issued laptops, to help them research and apply for new roles," added the founders as they plan to build Clubhouse 2.0 with a smaller, leaner team.

Clubhouse app shot to popularity in 2020 during COVID-19 pandemic and was once valued at $4 billion by investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global. The company last year laid off a portion of staff as part of restructuring.

"We need to reset the company, eliminate roles and take it down to a smaller, product-focused team. We believe that a smaller team will give us focus and speed, and help us launch the next evolution of the product," the founders said.