Gergely Orosz: Well, the interesting thing is that the news has been dominated by layoffs, because they are a big deal whenever they happen, and now theyâve just been happening, initially a few, and then some more⌠And now every week thereâs so many companies, small or sometimes large, doing it. But the companies that are not really affected, theyâre kind of hiring as always, and in fact, some are hiring more, are the ones that are honestly just not - they were never the most desirable companies to work at, but I think this might change just a little bit.
Iâll give you an example - thereâs a major bank in the Netherlands, which saw huge attrition at the end of 2021, because of this crazy market; maybe also because of my articles, Iâm not sure⌠Because a lot of people from that company went and they took offers at the likes of Twitter, or big tech, or venture-funded startups⌠They just got a big pay increase, and this bank couldnât move up with the market, because thatâs not how theyâre structured. They cannot respond quickly, and they typically donât. So they lost a lot of people. And they got us contractors, and they have a huge headcount to fill for 2022. I talked with a hiring manager there, and theyâre like âThis is great. Finally, we might actually be able to hit our headcount, but probably we wonât. Weâll probably still have empty headcount.â
[06:10] So the good news is that there are a lot of companies hiring. And Iâm also seeing â Iâm running a job board where companies can pay to access either candidates or post jobs, and I vet these jobs, but Iâm also seeing growth there with a lot of venture-funded stuff. So thereâs a lot of venture funding, especially at early stage, going on. And those companies - they want to hire they; they need to hire good people.
And then there are the companies that are a little bit more conservative. So a good example is iGen. Not many people know about iGen, but if I say Stripe, youâll know what Iâm talking about. iGen is the B2B version of Stripe. Theyâre based in Amsterdam; actually, theyâre headquartered there. Theyâre a publicly-traded company, and they were trading at about like $50 billion market cap. Iâm not sure where they are right now; maybe like 40, or something like that. So theyâre big, and they process about as much as Stripe in terms of merchants. At Uber, for example. Partially, we used iGen, and I think they power eBay, and Booking.com, and a lot of the sites that you just donât see behind the scenes⌠And Stripe announced that they were doing 14% layoffs. Meanwhile, iGen, because theyâre a publicly-traded company, you can see their financials - theyâre just passively profitable. For every dollar, they make 60 cents of EBITDA profits; thatâs not fully profit, but itâs a very strong signal⌠This is actually more profitable than, say, Google even, in terms of the percentage amount. And they just announced that they just sent out a memo to their staff that theyâre â not that theyâre not laying off, theyâre actually investing, because their fundamentals are strong.
And the headcount is also very different. This company, iGen, even though the price is about the same as Stripe, and they have a bit lower cut rate, so their ROI will be a bit lower, but they have a lot less staff; they have half the staff as Stripe, and at lower cost locations.
So all Iâm saying is, these are some of the companies that I know about who are kind of just doing fine, and there will be a lot of these⌠But we should acknowledge that itâs not the top of the market. So the companies that used to pay the best total compensation packages in terms of high base salary, great equity, all that - those companies are now struggling.
And then they are still hiring. I just talked with someone who got an offer from Google in London, and itâs a really good package⌠So thereâs all that going on, but I think the noise of all this bad news is really on top of peopleâs minds.
And then one last thing - if you look at what is actually happening in the market in terms of numbers, it is a correction, but when we look at â letâs say thereâs big news that Meta laid off 13% of staff, or 11,000 people; itâs a huge number, 11,000 people. But when we look back at how quickly they hired those people, just this year they hired 20,000 people. Theyâre 87,000 people right now. So by just laying off, theyâre kind of back where they were in March⌠Which is bad, right? But it just shows how much all companies actually hired. I rounded up between Meta, Microsoft and Google, I looked at their public filings of how many employees they have now and a year ago, and they went from having 400,000 employees, these three companies, full-time employees, 12 months ago, to having 500,000. So they added 100,000 in just one year. And Microsoft is 20-year-old company. Or, sorry, older; like 30-40 year-old. So in the last year, their growth was incredible.
So we are seeing a cutback, but it goes up that crazy - like, that last year when we talked about it. So it seems that itâs a correction, and it is painful, and itâs not happy to see them⌠And honestly, I think the reason people are just really shocked, most people, and said, âWe havenât seen thisâ, this whole market reminds me of what weâve seen in what finance folks have seen in 2007-2008. Itâs kind of our version of like a massive market correction in tech. And outside of tech, things are kind of going fine. You talk with other industries and theyâre like âYeah, itâs just like normal. Weâre not seeing any panic.â