SQ 2021 Revenue: $17B SQ 2021 cash and short term investments: $5.3B
Stripe 2021 Revenue: $12B
Similar businesses, operating in the same market, with the nearly the same number of employees (about 8000). Barring exceptional circumstances, we would expect their financial health to be roughly similar.
You said it yourself:
> the leaders have to... [deal] with investors
The economy is contracting and their share price is falling. They could afford to dip into cash and keep everyone on board but their investors are more concerned about propping up the valuation. They don't have two shits to give about the people they're letting go.
> They could afford to dip into cash
Why should they risk cash reserves with an uncertain future? So that they can layoff 30% later on if things get worse?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stripe-cuts-internal-valuation-...
Why? Because periods like now is the absolute best time to steal market share from established companies - which would grow the team and business. Startups (competitors) begin to post less risk because they'll be hard to find financing.
So - if growing the business is a CEO's top responsibility...if the leadership felt they could steal business from others that experience attrition - they would. My guess is they don't seem to feel that way about the current moment.
They're worried about surviving the contraction, nobody knows how long it will last and that cash only goes so far.
This an example of how bullshit jobs are created. Why keep people on a payroll if you have no use for them anymore?
It's not like startup founders who haven't been taking a salary (or been taking a below-market salary).
...can usually afford to never work again!
No, the created the business in attempt to get wildly wealthy and unfortunately they can't do this without also having to hire a bunch of people. They certainly don't create the business for the sake of employing people.
> People like to <poop> on CEO's & leaders in good times
In my experience the opposite is true, in good times people can't help but <polish the nob> of CEO's & leaders, since easy employment and good pay make the fundamentally exploitative nature of their relationship less visible.
> employees often forget that while the employee can just go get another job, the leaders have to keep hundreds, thousands...
of thousands of dollars in their account even when they "fail".
The key difference is that if I don't get another job, I lose my house and ultimately the ability to feed myself. If I don't play the game I quite literally am sentenced to death. The CEO of that lays off thousands can very easily spend the rest of their days in comfortable retirement at any given point.
I need to sell my labor to live, CEOs need my labor to get richer.
People like to <poop> on CEO's & leaders in good times, but employees often forget that while the employee can just go get another job, the leaders have to keep hundreds, thousands, of people employed while also retaining customers and dealing with investors. They have to deal with keeping those hundreds/thousands employed every...single... day.