Today we made changes to the Replicated team impacting 50 people in our Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and G/A organizations. This was a difficult choice as we believe in the potential of each and every one of these people to contribute to our business. However, after looking at all other options, it was clear that we needed to adjust our plans towards efficient growth in order to be fully financed through profitability. As CEO, the responsibility of this predicament rests solely with me and my decisions to hire aggressively in pursuit of top-line growth. I led us astray, and as a result, I have severely impacted many great people who deserve better.
To those impacted and the rest of our team, I'm deeply sorry to have let you down.
What we’ve been able to do for our alumni
We truly appreciate the contributions that our departing team members have made to our company. There is no perfect way to do this type of layoff, particularly in a fully remote company. We tried to take as many best practices from Airbnb and others to make this as respectful as possible. We are offering every departing employee extended severance, insurance coverage, dropping our one year options vesting cliff, allowing employees to keep their company-provided laptops and full home office setups, and offering placement assistance. These are great people, and any company would be incredibly lucky to have them on their team.
Where we went wrong
In trying to inspect deeply how we got to this point, I realize that there are many symptoms and contributing factors. We hired too fast in some areas and too slow in others. We focused on company building when we needed to keep our attention on customers and product execution. We needed too much hand-holding to get customers to the level of integration that would make them highly successful with our product. Various team members tried to get my attention on these issues, but I didn't heed their advice. I should have prevented some of these issues from coming and others I should have caught sooner. We started addressing some of these challenges in recent months, but unfortunately the impacts of those changes aren't realized overnight.
The path forward
By making this adjustment, we're able to confidently assure our customers that the tools & services they rely on to power their enterprise distributions will be available to them for the long term. We have more than doubled our straight-line runway to over three years. Additionally, our adjusted growth plan puts us on a path to achieve profitability in the next 18-24 months (giving us an infinite runway). We'll use those funds to continue to invest in our customers’ success via our Product, Engineering, and Support organizations. This will ensure we can further our mission of enabling software vendors to shortcut the effort required to offer world-class customer-controlled software. I know we can accomplish a lot with this team, and I strongly believe the future is bright for Replicated.
We have learned a costly lesson. I anticipate that our adjusted plans and a renewed sense of humility will protect us against ending up in a similar situation ever again.
Grant Miller, CEO of Replicated