- Snap is laying off around 2 dozen employees across 8 teams, according to Thursday reports.
- Many of the layoffs are said to affect Snapchat's content division.
- Spiegel, in a memo obtained by Cheddar, told employees that Snap needed to grow into "an organization that scales internally."
Snap is reportedly laying off around 2 dozen employees, according to reports from Cheddar and The Information on Thursday.
Many of the layoffs are said to come from Snap's team of human editors on its content team, though Cheddar reports some Snap employees based out of its New York and London offices were informed they needed to relocate to Snap's main Los Angeles campus. The layoffs reportedly affect 8 teams across the company.
Snap relies on human curators to sort through and promote public video snippets, which allow users to see on-the-ground coverage of popular events or developing news stories.
Spiegel addressed the layoffs in a memo obtained by Cheddar, telling employees that while its editorial team is still important, "We also need to have an organization that scales internally. This means that we must become exponentially more productive as we add additional resources and team members.” A source familiar with Snap's future plans said the company was planning to grow its content team in 2018.
Snap is currently overhauling its Snapchat app to separate "the social from the media,"as Spiegel explained in late November, in an attempt to make its notoriously confusing layout easier to understand and use while increasing its lagging user growth. The new design, which has been slow to rollout to most users, will feature separate feeds for publisher content and the more personal conversations from friends and other Snapchat users, as Business Insider first reported. The redesign is now scheduled for a wide release to all Snapchat users by the end of Q1 2018.
Cheddar's Alex Heath also tweeted out additional details about how the layoffs were handled internally at Snap.
In a rallying cry of sorts seemingly aimed at notorious Snapchat-copycat Facebook, Spiegel reportedly wrote that Snap would continue to "out-innovate" competitors and he wasn't interested in second place.
Lastly, I’d like to make it very clear that our team is not here to win 2nd place. The journey is long, the work is hard, but we have and we will consistently, systematically, out-innovate our competitors with substantially few resources and in far less time. And we will have a blast doing it.
Read the full memo over on Cheddar.
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