Robinhood trading app co-founder Vlad Tenev announced on Tuesday that the company is laying off 9% of its full-time employees. The company’s stock price at the time of writing fell shortly afterwards to just $10.00 — 12 cents above its all-time low as a public company.
- According to the co-founder’s blog post, Robinhood experienced a period of hypertrophy from 2019 to 2021. Net funded accounts increased from 5 million to 22 million, and revenue increased from $278 million to $1.8 billion.
- However, this resulted in the company increasing its workforce from 700 to 3800, creating many “duplicate roles and job functions”. This has clearly led to additional complexity/lower efficiency in the company, thereby deciding to reduce the size of the company.
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“While the decision to take this action was not an easy one, it is a deliberate step to ensure that we are able to meet our strategic goals and advance our mission of democratizing finance,” Tenev said.
- The company says it will continue its international expansion efforts, and introduce new brokerage, crypto, and spending/savings products.
- Robinhood became popular in the crypto community as a Dogecoin trading app. It currently owns about one-third of all Dogecoin in circulation on behalf of its clients.
- By comparison, the Grayscale Bitcoin Fund is the largest single owner of bitcoin, but owns only 3% of the coins in circulation on behalf of customers.
- The app flourished the most in the second quarter of 2021 when Dogecoin reached its all-time high. However, the app’s revenue declined steadily over the following quarters.
- Robinhood recently announced a Bitcoin Lightning Network integration, but its CEO still believes Dogecoin could become “the currency of the Internet and the people of the future.”
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