Holy shit, sorry if I'm coming in to this discussion late and empty handed but isn't Medium basically a fucking blog?
It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is more focused but also less proven."
In so many words, "We'll think of something."
Maybe they would try to get acquihired
Edit: Looks like Instagram had raised 50m before being acquihired. Definitely a much different situation than this one, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that a company which raised 100+ million would be acquihired.
See definition from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring): "...the process of acquiring a company to recruit its employees, without necessarily showing an interest in its products and services—or their continued operation"
Isn't it worth considering that those 50 employees should have never been hired, but only were due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model?
Or having taken on additional responsibilities (loan, started a family, etc) based on having the job.
Getting a job that shouldn't have existed and then losing it again isn't zero sum.
Yep, we are seeing this time and time again with startups in the Bay Area who went on a landgrab for talent a few years ago and now realize they can't support them as the VC money dried up. I actually wonder if Medium was trying to raise more and they were unable to, therefore they have to do this and are trying to spin it positively.
I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web. And I want Medium to do well. And maybe I'm too cynical about the startup and SV world (I moved away from SF in October), but this smells of the same old same old to me.
Serious questions: why and how?
I both write a blog and read blogs. I have never had any desire to move my blog to Medium, and ask myself "is it really worth it?" before clicking on any Medium link.
Branding
I'm not sure there are many companies such a scenario has worked out well for, but I'd love to dig into examples if people have any. And working out well can mean different things for investors vs employees vs customers vs free users vs readers. I would expect the interests to become less aligned the more investment they take on without being profitable (see Evernote's recent moves and resulting user backlash).
Its due to a deeply embedded business philosophy where CEOs and other business people try to create bigger companies, and not necessarily better companies. Sometimes they are able to trigger a mushroom growth, but most of the times they fail. But due to survivor bias, they create a few more wannabe CEOs who again trey to create bigger and not better companies, and the cycle repeats.
Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices(which usually have about 1000+ employees). I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.
Even disheartening thing is that they might have already dried up most of their cash, and still don't know how to run a business. Executives are currently playing a dangerous game of "Let's see if we can raise more" and "We'll think of something".