He phrases it as due to redundant overhead for cashapp and square, plus a move to smaller, flatter teams as a result of AI. Not saying he's going to be right just that they're profitable and I believe this isn't a money thing.
darth_avocado 2 hours ago [-]
> I believe this isn't a money thing.
What are you even talking about? Why does ANY business get rid of people? For funsies? X_X
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
> Why does ANY business get rid of people?
Some people are negative value even if their salary was $0.
upmind 3 hours ago [-]
How did they manage to spend 68M on it? Genuinely asking or is the number not accurate as it is clumped together with other stuff?
mikeevans 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know what event planning costs but running an event for ~10k people that includes flights, hotels, food, event space, etc. is expensive I guess.
mizzao 1 hours ago [-]
At $6.8k/head, that's inefficient (a startup wouldn't spend like that) but not egregious if it was for e.g. a weeklong event or something.
3 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
dang 2 hours ago [-]
Ok, we've taken the party out of the title above. Thanks for the first-hand information.
ta9000 2 hours ago [-]
Were you laid off?
darth_avocado 2 hours ago [-]
I’m going to take a wild guess that the answer is no
happyopossum 3 hours ago [-]
You can call it a 'party' if you want, but a company-wide in-person event is a) valuable, and b) expensive.
Calling an all-hands a party without any supporting evidence feels willfully negligent.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
$68M/10000 employees = $6800/1 employee
A lot? Not a lot? Don’t know anymore.
mpeg 3 hours ago [-]
I've been to all hands where it probably cost that much just in travel: business class LHR to SFO, hotel for a few nights, dinners, drinks, entertainment, venue, guest speakers, and on and on.
It doesn't seem excessive, the networking in these things is often really worth it
quaunaut 3 hours ago [-]
In what business is everyone in the company going business class?
frutiger 2 hours ago [-]
Bloomberg Engineering
mmcclure 3 hours ago [-]
It's on the high side, but...honestly not absurd? "Party" implies one night rager, but the source says "in-person company event." That seems more like a multi-day company onsite to me, and the total bill per person there probably includes travel, accommodations, food on top of any overall event costs.
Bringing a remote employee to SF just to work out of an office for a few days can easily cost a few grand.
layer8 3 hours ago [-]
At the cited $340000 salary, it amounts to around the same as one extra week of vacation for everyone.
dangoor 3 hours ago [-]
Seems plausible. Travel (some international), hotels, taxis, venues, food, and entertainment. It adds up. Probably not a single day event.
Scoundreller 3 hours ago [-]
If you account the employee wages into it, then it really adds up.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
For an event where many employees have to be flown in and stay at hotels in an expensive city? That's normal.
Hosting in-person events for 10,000 people is expensive even without having to transport and house anyone.
nerdsniper 3 hours ago [-]
That actually sounds pretty reasonable.
darth_avocado 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s just me, but I think being able to retain more employees is more valuable than flying the entire company for an in person event.
frde_me 3 hours ago [-]
One could argue a smaller number of employees that are more motivated and feel connected to their coworkersis better than a more employees that are all isolated and "meh".
surgical_fire 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing inspires people to feel motivated and connected more than layoffs.
darth_avocado 3 hours ago [-]
You have fewer people you worked with, a constant threat of unemployment and more work? Sign me up for that boss
Can it be that valuable when 40% of the participants aren't?
layer8 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe it served to find out which of them weren’t valuable. ;)
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
The $68M number comes from a statement that says their General and Administrative expenses were up year over year and the growth was primarily driven by an in-person company event.
The Tweet extrapolates to assume that the entire difference was due to the event and calls it a "party"
Even if we assume 100% of the increase was due to the event, that's about $6800 per employee, or about a week or two of pay for developers.
This includes flights, lodging, and food for remote employees. That adds up fast.
This is just Twitter ragebait.
Hamuko 3 hours ago [-]
>"General and administrative expenses were up 14% year over year on a GAAP basis, driven in part by an in-person company event. Excluding this expense, general and administrative expenses remained roughly flat year over year in the third quarter."
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
> roughly
I did the other math assuming it was 100% for the in-person event anyway.
npilk 4 hours ago [-]
Just because G&A was up $68m doesn't mean it was all spent on that one party...
Edit: never mind, the report clarifies that without the party expense G&A would have been flat YoY.
Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall.
Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done.
From Wikipedia:
> In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]
rwmj 2 hours ago [-]
You have to compare it to what else they could have done with the money, such as investing in their own growth, or even giving it back to shareholders if they had no good ideas what to do with the money.
Scoundreller 1 hours ago [-]
I did! If they invested it in themselves it would have been a 50-75% loss, same with doing a buyback (return the cash to stockholders) at a high stock price.
Dunno what better proxy I could
use for how it would have went other than their actual stock price. Unless we are to think their next best idea that they didn’t invest in would have done better than all the other things they did invest in. But that’s very speculative.
Instead they got a blended 300% gain on btc.
Should have sold the entire company for cash and bought bitcoin at the timelines they did.
rwmj 20 minutes ago [-]
Maybe if they'd invested in themselves they would have been able to expand (eg. they could have hired more sales people or spent more on advertising).
If they truly were unable to find a reliable investment then they should have given the money back to shareholders instead of speculating on a non-productive non-asset with awful negative externalities.
ralferoo 3 hours ago [-]
I sincerely hope the event branding played on calling it a "Block Party".
But anyway, as others have said, the tweet seems outrageous at first, but at $6800 per employee for a multi-day offsite, with hotels, travel, etc included, it doesn't seem excessive. I'm sure their salary for that month was significantly higher.
aitforalll 4 hours ago [-]
laying of 50% of your workforce is the obvious solution. next year the party will only be $34 million. repeat that 4 more times and you get down to just over $4 million.
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
Kinda how it worked for my last full time job. Full on all-hands which flew all the remote workers in, and my lead made 2 guesses: "Either we've been acquired or the IP has been cancelled". I guess the sad part is that an acquisition wouldn't guarantee I wouldn't be laid off anyway.
danans 3 hours ago [-]
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. With 4000 fewer employees, they could have a $136M meetup party and still be ahead by hundreds of millions, assuming they can sustain or increase revenue.
That's the big bet software companies are making right now.
ta9000 2 hours ago [-]
In the scope of Jack’s mismanagement, this seems minor. See: $29 billion for a BNPL company.
hmokiguess 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe that was the selection process, those that were less fun and didn’t engage into the AI water coolers are now packing their belongings
ricardobeat 3 hours ago [-]
Block had more than 4000 employees? Rarely hear of it.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Party $68,000,000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my company is dying
anon7000 3 hours ago [-]
Well, the layoff post explicitly said that the company’s financial health was good.
yifanl 3 hours ago [-]
Oh, well if they said so, there's no problem.
wood_spirit 3 hours ago [-]
Often embezzlement cases include crazy expenses.
Just put in my mind by the grift and corruption posts that are currently trending on HN front page right now.
kshacker 2 hours ago [-]
I do not know about here, but back home in India, 68 M would be so juicy for someone in the organizing chain to not take a cut. People get fired all the time, but sometimes the gravy train can run for years before getting caught.
No first hand experience ... just anecdotes and some news reports.
atonse 3 hours ago [-]
haha my brain went like...
"ok.. but was it a party for all 9,000 people?"
"maybe they had great caterers"
... then I did the math. It's $7.5k per employee.
Clearly I'm just not creative enough to know how to waste money like an SV company.
the_mar 2 hours ago [-]
it included flights, hotels, food and travel expenses for 9000 for multiple days, as well as the "party".
US-based travel for 1 person for 5 days is easily 4K, on top of that some people were probably international so it would be higher, and on top of that there are the "party" expenses like venue and catering which probably wasn't that significant.
johnnyanmac 3 hours ago [-]
you don't need to get that fancy dijon mustard. Definitely can cut down on the food bill.
etc-hosts 3 hours ago [-]
last Block/Square party I went to had MC Hammer as a DJ.
an0malous 3 hours ago [-]
that's where the innovation happens
BonoboIO 3 hours ago [-]
Travel and Entertainment
yieldcrv 2 hours ago [-]
Wait till you find out the “party budget per employee” at the company you work for
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
... That's $7,000 per employee. I want to hear more about this party :D
fhd2 3 hours ago [-]
I got curious as well, because the craziest party poor me can imagine would clock in at maybe half that, including travel. All I could find:
> The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe.
So that'd make it 8.5k per person. Building stages, paying permits, hiring acts like these, I bet that's where it mostly went.
It was an in-person event, so flights, lodging, and food could have easily consumed a lot of that.
Running events is expensive when you have to fly your remote employees in and house them for multiple days.
CyberDildonics 3 hours ago [-]
A gift basket that includes fancy mixed nuts, some luxury soaps, a 96 core Epyc CPU, and a coupon book to local restaurants.
mattmaroon 3 hours ago [-]
He said very specifically that the layoffs weren’t for financial reasons, and they are publicly traded company so you can just look at the reports. Anyone who thinks this wasn’t because of AI has a level of optimism I’ll never achieve.
jollyllama 3 hours ago [-]
Cynicism can be optimism when the prevailing narrative is doom and gloom.
How is the competing narrative of cutting teams that were working on non-core or experimental projects falsified by any of this? Why wouldn't they put a brave face on that and chalk it up to AI? You can see how the stock market has rewarded it.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
One key piece of financial information in those reports is that that their revenue growth fell off a cliff when ZIRP ended (months before ChatGPT came out) and never recovered to even pre-Covid levels. There's no indication that their core business is unhealthy, and I'm not claiming to rule out that AI is related, but it makes sense that a company transitioning to "maintenance mode" might find itself wanting to be a lot smaller.
Rendered at 22:08:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Was it necessary? Probably not. But I found the in-person time valuable, especially with teammates I’d never met face to face.
Source: I was there
He phrases it as due to redundant overhead for cashapp and square, plus a move to smaller, flatter teams as a result of AI. Not saying he's going to be right just that they're profitable and I believe this isn't a money thing.
What are you even talking about? Why does ANY business get rid of people? For funsies? X_X
Some people are negative value even if their salary was $0.
Calling an all-hands a party without any supporting evidence feels willfully negligent.
A lot? Not a lot? Don’t know anymore.
It doesn't seem excessive, the networking in these things is often really worth it
Bringing a remote employee to SF just to work out of an office for a few days can easily cost a few grand.
Hosting in-person events for 10,000 people is expensive even without having to transport and house anyone.
/s
The Tweet extrapolates to assume that the entire difference was due to the event and calls it a "party"
Even if we assume 100% of the increase was due to the event, that's about $6800 per employee, or about a week or two of pay for developers.
This includes flights, lodging, and food for remote employees. That adds up fast.
This is just Twitter ragebait.
I did the other math assuming it was 100% for the in-person event anyway.
Edit: never mind, the report clarifies that without the party expense G&A would have been flat YoY.
Side note: I have no idea what Block does and why they need 10,000 employees anyway.
Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall.
Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done.
From Wikipedia:
> In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]
Dunno what better proxy I could use for how it would have went other than their actual stock price. Unless we are to think their next best idea that they didn’t invest in would have done better than all the other things they did invest in. But that’s very speculative.
Instead they got a blended 300% gain on btc.
Should have sold the entire company for cash and bought bitcoin at the timelines they did.
If they truly were unable to find a reliable investment then they should have given the money back to shareholders instead of speculating on a non-productive non-asset with awful negative externalities.
But anyway, as others have said, the tweet seems outrageous at first, but at $6800 per employee for a multi-day offsite, with hotels, travel, etc included, it doesn't seem excessive. I'm sure their salary for that month was significantly higher.
That's the big bet software companies are making right now.
Data $150
Rent $800
Party $68,000,000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my company is dying
Just put in my mind by the grift and corruption posts that are currently trending on HN front page right now.
No first hand experience ... just anecdotes and some news reports.
"ok.. but was it a party for all 9,000 people?"
"maybe they had great caterers"
... then I did the math. It's $7.5k per employee.
Clearly I'm just not creative enough to know how to waste money like an SV company.
> The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe.
So that'd make it 8.5k per person. Building stages, paying permits, hiring acts like these, I bet that's where it mostly went.
Running events is expensive when you have to fly your remote employees in and house them for multiple days.
How is the competing narrative of cutting teams that were working on non-core or experimental projects falsified by any of this? Why wouldn't they put a brave face on that and chalk it up to AI? You can see how the stock market has rewarded it.