SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Block, the financial services tech company run by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, plans to cut around 1,000 jobs in the latest round of layoffs to roil the Bay Area tech industry. In a third-quarter shareholder letter published last Thursday, Dorsey, announced the company would be capping its employee head count at 12,000.
Block currently employs just over 13,000 people, according to the transcript of last week’s earnings call, posted on Seeking Alpha. The proposed job cuts would amount to roughly 1,000 workers losing their jobs.
The job cuts are expected to be implemented over several months with the company targeting the end of 2024 to reach its goal, according to the earnings call transcript.
“As we continue to view the business through the lens of our investment framework, we continue to find opportunities for constraints we believe will lead to greater growth,” said Dorsey in the shareholder letter. “We implemented one of these a year before our IPO: an absolute cap on the number of people we had at the company. It was very effective at driving performance, scoping our work through better prioritization, and looking critically at the number of products we offered against our strategy. We are going to do that again now, by creating an absolute cap on the number of people we have at the company, held firm at 12,000 people until we feel the growth of the business has meaningfully outpaced the growth of the company.”
Block, formerly known as Square Inc., maintained its headquarters in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood before moving it across the Bay to Oakland’s Uptown Station last year. The company maintains a suite of several different tech brands, including payment platforms Square and Cash App, music streaming service Tidal, and crypto platform Spiral.
The Block job cuts are the latest in an ongoing series of Bay Area tech layoffs. On Tuesday, Nextdoor announced it would be reducing its workforce by 25%.
