HubSpot Layoff Memo: What She Got Right and Wrong

I do think it's worth mentioning that everything about this conversation is hard, and it doesn't matter if you're the person impacted or the person responsible for executing one of these things.

Uh, it sticks with you, and it sticks with you for a long time.

I feel for Yamini, I feel for her team, I feel for every employee that gets affected by these layoffs.

One of the things I loved about the memo, if you look at the way it's structured, r- right up front, this is what's happening to a certain subset of impacted people.

So getting to the punchline, a certain number of jobs are being eliminated, and if that is you, the next 15 minutes, you have that information available to you.

Without starting from that, then everybody's kind of reading into it, like, what does it mean to me, before they can actually-

Mm-hmm

... internalize any of the f- next messages.

So to me, that was class act.

It doesn't start with, "Hey, we're moving into the future.

Isn't this wonderful? Oh, by the way-

Yes, right

... a bunch of you will be affected"

...

this is the next chapter for us-

Yes, right, right

... and the rest of you can-

Yeah

... can go pound sand.

Yeah.

It's really awful, but this is what's happening.

And then she immediately gets to the why.

She was very explicit in the memo.

She said that it wasn't because of AI.

But the reality is that it is because of AI.