The Scoop #20: The e-commerce growth bubble pops

Why are we seeing large layoffs at companies where business boomed in 2020-21? Plus: Google’s hiring freeze and where they keep investing.

The Scoop is a bonus series, covering patterns and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high-growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message!

We have plenty of topics to cover today:

1. Rebellion at DataRobot over insider stock sales. Five executives were allowed to sell $32M in stock at the struggling startup, all done in secret. Employees then found out about this and the backslash rocked the company. What can founders wanting to take money off the table learn from this incident?

2. Layoffs at Shopify. The company let go 10% of its staff and posted a surprising loss a day later in their quarterly earnings.

3. The e-commerce growth bubble and layoffs. Why have we seen so many layoffs at companies where business boomed during 2020-21, like Shopify, Hopin, Cameo, Peloton and others? Looking at how e-commerce grew - then shrunk - in the US has some answers.

4. Google’s hiring freeze. The freeze dropped internally, and I talked with managers on what this means. Also: why did Google stop hiring entry-level software engineers?

5. Google’s earnings analysis. Investments the company is making - and areas they’ll likely hire more software engineers - economic uncertainty and how all this might speed up Google’s return to the office.

6. Scoop: hiring slowdowns. Vimeo, Robinhood, Graphcore.

Let’s jump in!