Snap Inc is laying off around 100 employees within the advertising and sales department, according to Bloomberg. This is the second reported round of layoffs this month, with the company laying off around 100 people from the engineering department in early March.
Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan sent us the following statement:
Over the past two years our company has grown a tremendous amount. Late last year we asked senior leaders across Snap to look closely at their teams to ensure they had the right resources and organizations to support their missions. As a result, new structures have been put in place for Content, Engineering, Sales and many other parts of Snap. These changes reflect our view that tighter integration and closer collaboration between our teams is a critical component of sustainably growing our business. While this process has required us to make some really tough decisions, we believe that rigorously ensuring our team structure always aligns with our goals will make us stronger.
This comes at an interesting time for Snap. While the company could potentially benefit from the #deletefacebook movement (not that it’s a shining beacon of consumer privacy), it is also facing its own backlash over an unwanted design update to the popular camera/communications app.
As my colleague Matthew Lynley noted earlier this month, Snap wants to be a camera company. This is a bit of a leap from the company’s strategy as of 2015, with the launch of Discover, which was more of a media play.
Since Spectacles, with its spike of popularity and quick drop off to forgotten consumer gadget, Snap seems much more focused on how we use the camera to communicate with one another. Now that the company is public, and has a duty to shareholders, that vision may require some retooling in the corporate structure.
We reached out to Snap for comment and will update when we hear back.
