Big Technology Podcast - Out At Twitter — With Simon Balmain

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Simon Balmain was laid off by Twitter today. A former Twitter senior community manager, Balmain takes us through the last few weeks at the company, describing the atmosphere, employee reactions to the layoffs, and whether the company can still function after losing this many people. Join us for a tough but balanced look at a historic moment at the company.

Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And we are going to do this episode, Emergency Style, just going to throw it right up on the feed. No music, because we have some serious breaking news. There's been serious layoffs at Twitter. And I thought you might want to hear from someone who's been inside the company and can share a little bit about their perspective about what it's been like, what it means, and where Twitter and the employees go from here. So joining us today is Simon Balmain. He was a former senior community manager at Twitter. One of the many employees tweeting about his departure.

It's been very interesting to watch it play out in public. And his tweet caught my eye, and he's graciously appeared to come and talk us through. What's happened? Simon, welcome to the show. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. So where are you based? So I'm in England.

I live in Birmingham, which is in the middle of the country, just a couple of hours north of London. So kind of between working from home here in Birmingham and, you know, going into the London office occasionally. Yeah. And now, can you share a little bit about how you seem to be fairly early? Because on Thursday, Twitter had announced that it was going to do these layoffs. And then you tweeted pretty soon afterwards.

So how did you find out? So we don't. obviously been hearing these, can you, is my voice clear? Is it sound okay to you? Yep, loud and clear. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So we'd obviously been hearing about these issues, these potential rumors of layoffs since, pretty much since the deal was completed around a week ago, the rumor mill sort of churned into overdrive with this idea that big layoffs were on the horizon. We got the email. Everyone in the company, as I understand it, got this email last night.

It was pretty early hours of the morning in the UK. It was after midnight. I tend to be up quite late because I primarily had been working with people in the US and working on products in San Francisco and on the West Coast. So those are kind of my normal hours. And within the email kind of said, yeah, there's going to be this huge reduction in head. account, uh, you will, if you're affected, you'll get an email to your personal email.

And if not, you'll get something to your work email. And it was within an hour of that going out that, uh, I noticed my laptop flash. Um, it had been sort of remotely, uh, removed from the system and kind of set to the Mac security pin setting that you get when you sort of remotely wipe or revoke access to systems. Um, and after that, I checked. and it was the same with my Gmail G Suite access that was revoked and my Slack access

or revoked as well. Wait, that's how you found out just everything. Yeah, that's how I found out just everything just removed straight away. Was there follow-up communication from the company after that? Yeah, there's been follow-up communication.

Very, let's just say, very carefully worded. Obviously, different countries, even different states in the U.S., different territories, you know, the labor laws can vary widely, right? And in the UK, we actually have pretty good labor laws. So there is certain things that have to be said and certain steps that have to be taken, processes that have to be followed. Otherwise, you can find yourself in serious legal liability. So certainly, at least here

in the UK, and I'm sure, you know, everywhere else relative to whatever local laws are applicable, is paying very close attention to ensure that this process is followed. And, you know, whatever, if that happens, then that's fine. If it doesn't, then we'll see where we go from there. Right. What's the mood been like inside the company? I mean, I know that you're in the UK, right, smaller office than in New York, San Francisco, but I imagine you're all connected digitally. Yes. I mean, I've primarily been working with, mostly with folks in the U.S.,

pretty much my whole time at the company. I guess the maybe yeah maybe we start with like when musk had you know agreed and then we can go through you know the various stages so when you found out that Elon had was actually going to close this deal was their surprise I mean it happened it's hard to believe but it happened just a week ago yeah well it's the whole process even going back to you know April when he first made this offer has been just an absolute roller coaster of ups and downs and so hard to talk about that roller coaster yeah unpredictable um he made he you know he made this offer in in uh in april um i suppose based upon the relative economic market at the time pertaining to tech companies

uh shortly after that you know global events that took place like you know what's been happening in Ukraine and, you know, various other things, caused the majority of tech stocks to, you know, drop quite dramatically over that time, at which point it seemed like he felt like he had made a mistake and perhaps should have waited a bit longer and then spent the summer trying to get out of it while denigrating the company, the executives, the employees in the process. What was the mood inside the company while that happened? it was just bizarre it was bizarre um nobody really knew what to make of it all but certainly it was very distracting um we we didn't get a huge amount of communication from the previous administration

uh but it was more than we got in the last week from the new management to certainly um Was there like a general sense that like, okay, this deal probably, once he tried to get out of it, was there a general sense like, oh, he probably won't be the new owner or was it sort of like limbo? I mean, at one point, it certainly seemed like he might, might be willing to pay some kind of nominal fee to get out of it. It certainly seemed for a while that he absolutely did not want to do it if he had the choice to. and maybe that's still the case maybe he didn't have a choice not to do it at this point given what happened in court

who's to say it's a very complex acquisition matter but certainly when after the judge had agreed to this delay after he said that he was going to close it I think at that point

there was no way this wasn't going to happen and yeah and so when he said he was going to close Did that catch you and the employees by surprise? How was that perceived internally? Because he had spent, you right, he had spent the whole summer denigrating the company. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it didn't take me by surprise or really anybody that I spoke to,

and purely because it's hard to, he's a very unpredictable character. that, you know, logically, with most people, you would think that if somebody spent a large amount of time saying, hey, I don't want to do this thing anymore, I'm not going to do it, then they wouldn't do it. So, but that's, you know, you can't, you can't predict what, what someone like that does. So, I, yeah, I wasn't surprised. Right. And how do people react once he said, okay, you know, this is going to close inside the company? it's hard it's yeah it's it's it's hard to say because again even though he had said that anything could have happened at that point like you know track record had proven that what is true one day may not be true the next day

and what is false one day may be true the next day it's it's just impossible to tell so it was just like this very prolonged just waiting game emotional roller coaster of not knowing what to think um when i i think the real mood shift came um on the day that you know the deal was closed and he you know showed up at the office and and fired all the executives um right you know these these are incredible people that that you know most people in the company have have had some kind of interaction with one way or another depending you know obviously what what department you're in and to have that sort of chain of command just like broken at that level was it was horrible to see and I think at that point we knew that you know these big layoffs

were pretty much inevitable plus plus the fact that there was no communication internally about any of this stuff right you would expect something and got nothing and so how are people communicating how are they figuring out what was going on on pretty much on platform following the news following yeah following you know following the resources of of deep diving investigators like your casey newtons and people like that yeah we're finding out a lot of stuff at the same time everybody else is right now there's this rumor that 75% of the staff was going to get cut people picked up on that inside yeah um That was the number that was going around for a few weeks.

He did say when he went into the San Francisco office that that number was not accurate and he didn't know where it came from. I think it is probably not quite that high, but probably not far off either. Yeah, so how many of the people that you worked with closely are still at the company? it's really hard to say i mean i haven't heard from from everybody uh yeah i i know that a lot of people are not it's hard to it's it's it's it's a sea of people saying that they're not and uh the the odd message from somebody sort of sheepishly saying i'm still here and i don't know how to feel oh wow interesting so um can you

can you talk a little bit about the plans that Elon said he wanted to introduce? Was there any excitement to, well, actually, let me ask you this. What is your opinion about Elon, you know, or what was it before this all began? So I personally try not to really have too many solid opinions about people that I haven't met or don't know that are based on. you know, media or projections or whatever, I try as a rule not to do that. So while there certainly were people that were very anti him, and certainly there are a lot of people that are very pro him, I tend to find that historically I've just been quite neutral. I'm like, I will judge people by their actions if I think it's a good thing that you've done or if I think it's a bad

thing that you've done and tend not to make, you know, personality judgments on people that I don't know. Do you believe in the plans that he laid out for Twitter? And what will the fact that he's cut so many employees due to his ability to actually see them through? That's a good question. Given that I don't know the exact number that's impacted, but I do believe it to be quite high, I think it's going to be challenging. It's going to be challenging. And I think that there are people who, even if they have survived this, probably very likely to leave of their own accord in the not too distant future.

Yeah, it's difficult. As far as what their plans might be, I think one thing that's pretty clear from the economics of this deal is that he's on the hook for quite a lot of. money in not a huge amount of time you know we're talking a billion plus in interest payments alone to the financiers every year you know that's more revenue than do it has been making uh obviously you know some of it is collateral against you know Tesla stock and and whatever else and um he's not going to want to you know have to sell other things unless he's forced to So it's sort of this juggling game for him, I guess.

But I think what that makes clear is product-wise, the focus is extremely likely to be on everything that drives new revenue and ignore everything that doesn't. Right. That's my sort of crystal ball of it from what I've seen in the last week or so. I think my personal feeling about the broad direction, of product travel is there's likely to be a couple of different things and one of those is that there will be a large focus on products that directly drive revenue to the company in that the

user will need to pay to do x or y and then the other one will be a high priority attempt at sort of creator programs influencer programs where users pay other users and the company takes a cut for whatever content or access or features they might be able to use. And I think between those two streams, that's likely to be the product priority for at least the midterm, if not the next few years. Yeah. I want to ask you a question that's sort of been with me since this whole thing started, which is that a lot of people have focused on Elon, but you mentioned you didn't hear

much from the previous administration. I guess you started in November 21. Was Jack Dorsey still the CEO at that point? Jack Dorsey was still a CEO at that point. Jack stepped down, I think about two weeks after I started. And two weeks is kind of your onboarding. So tell me about, yeah, what was your reaction when that happened? Yeah, I was excited to potentially work with Jack.

You know, I think there's always this sort of, you know, cult of the founder, as they call it. And that's, you know, it's a real thing. You know, when you're the founding CEO, there's a certain amount of sort of mystique that that goes along with that, whether that's, you know, you know, warranted or unwarranted. Certainly with Jack, having, you know, gone through his journey of being removed from the company and setting up another successful company with Block formerly known as Square. And then coming back to Twitter, you know, there was, you know, that kind of element around him, when he, the funny thing is when he stepped down about, you know, two weeks is about

the general onboarding at Twitter. So those first two weeks is just a lot of setting up your systems and reading this and doing that and you're not really doing any actual work. But as I recall it, there was a tradition of Jack jumping into a Google Meet call with every batch of new employees on a pretty rolling basis. And that was actually in our calendars, and it was supposed to happen like two or three days after the day that he ended up saying, you know, I'm stepping down. And so that didn't happen. So I was like days away from having that, you know, get this like, well, you know, group time. Actually talk to Jack. But from what I heard from people that had been at the company for, you know, a while at that point, there was a sort of general feeling that he had been. kind of absent for a year or two, kind of mentally checked out, probably since the stuff in D.C., honestly, and after he got called into Congress and all that stuff.

Really? Yeah, I mean, I don't know that that's the case, but the timeline seems to match up. Does Jack, I mean, Jack said Elon Musk was the perfect person for Twitter. I mean, and then Parag, of course, you know, worked, you know, was his handpicked successor and you didn't hear much from him, apparently, you know, during his time because the Elon thing came in pretty soon after. Yeah. You know, does the fact that they push the company to Elon and now all these employees are out, do you have any reaction to that? It's a lot, there's a lot of people are talking about like Elon's role in this and, of course, not great in the layoff. I feel like this layoff is very ill-advised.

you can't possibly know how to cut half the company in, you know, in just a couple days. I've written that, like, some of the stuff he's done is good, but he's definitely, like, it seems kind of reckless. But so he deserves his fair share criticism. But I wonder what you think about Jack, like pushing the company to somebody who would then go ahead and cut so many. Yeah, I mean, Jack is certainly not an innocent bystander in this turn of events. you know, a very active participant in this turn of events, even having not been at the company

for, you know, a year and not been on the board since I think May is when he stepped down from the board. Clearly a very active participant. I think it's common knowledge that that Jack did not like the board and the way the company was set up. And, you know, it was it was the existence of of of that whole structure from the beginning that was what allowed them to to push him out when he got pushed out and you know eventually he made his way back in perhaps perhaps due to there not being any better options at that time but certainly it's pretty clear to me that the structure of the company and the way it was set up has been something that he's been unhappy about for quite some time.

So on that basis, you know, it's, um, there's no sense of betrayal there. It's hard for me to feel a sense of betrayal because you were on there for a couple weeks. Yeah, because he did step down so quickly. What was it like, yeah, what was it like with, um, working under Paragos? where he was pushing the sale to Elon, obviously stood to make a lot of money on the way out and clearly had an idea of what was going to happen inside? I don't think personally that communication during that time frame

from the top of the company was as good as it could have been. I feel like there was a lot of just keep people hanging and tell them as little as possible. and that just repeated week after week, month after month. What I will say is that the level of executives underneath Parag were incredible. There was some absolutely incredible people there. Huge amount of respect for people like Leslie Berlin, who was the CEO. It was now out.

Yeah, former CMO. Yeah. The product heads. I was a huge fan of Kvon. It was surprising. And then former head of product, former guest on the show. Oh, you've had Kavon on the show. Amazing.

We had a great conversation. I love Kavon. I was very surprised that he was laid off. So, you know, fired earlier in the year. Apparently he's back in Twitter headquarters now, which is interesting. That's a rumor that I heard. I have yet to speak to anybody that personally has been able to verify that rumor. Okay. Interesting.

Yeah. Kavon, fantastic. So many great people in the company. Tony Hale, who came through the scroll acquisition. Right. This absolutely incredible. Yeah. Rembert Brown, who was maybe still... By the way, Tony also laid off today.

He just announced it. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Wow, you know more than that. I mean, I've been on the phone to press all day. So, wow. Wow. Tony's incredible.

That's sad. Nobody is safe. nobody is safe right what was the mood inside the company like over the last 24 hours or so before the actual notices went out like clearly like this was something that was imminent it was reported in the press maybe you can talk a little bit about yeah that the mood over the last day and what Twitter culture has been like

sure yeah I'm just checking my calendar so there are there are fun sort of get together social channels in the Twitter Slack very sort of general hang out talk vibes and in one of those channels

for hours and hours and hours and on end yesterday basically every single person in the company was posting the salute emoji as a sign of solidarity and that just went on for hours and hours and hours

interesting that was yeah it was it was something it was something to see yeah general mood has just been just yeah all all

hugely deflating I think for a lot of people but I think one of the things that props us all up is the culture, the sort of historical culture of people within the company and people who had left the company is, it's like a giant support network.

You know, even leading up to, you know, what's happened today and last night, you've seen very, very influential people who are no longer at the company saying, I'm happy to do a referral, talk to me, whatever you need. Like, it's been like that with everyone. And it's, I think this is a pivotal moment in tech history, right? Because think about all of the people that came to the company as through acquisitions, who were CEOs, who had raised venture capital, who had had successful startups. It's a lot of people and all the people that directly were.

under those. Like, I'm one of them. Like, my company's sphere messenger, the CEO of that was a guy called Nick Diologio. Nick was the youngest person to ever get venture capital when he was like 15, sold his first company to Yahoo when he was 17. And this was, you know, his next company, you know, did the same thing again. Nick's, Nick's incredible. He's a genius. I don't know if Nick has been laid off, but certainly a lot of the sphere acquisition people, including myself, have been or believe that to be the case right now with the sort of lack of communication. that we had. And that's going to be the case for a lot of incredible people in the company.

And it doesn't seem to be from as far as we can tell. There's no sort of rhyme or reason to teams or roles in particular or anything. It seems to be everybody, right? So you have basically a perfect storm of C-suite executives, people who know how to get VC funding, programmers, designers, marketing people, community people. like you've got you've got everything you need right and it's impossible for me to think that there won't be a bunch of new incredible startups that come out of this yeah how do you respond to some of the folks who've said i mean i've been tweeting about this a little bit and i've been

surprised to see like the lack of empathy from some people who've been like you know these employees had it coming or you know lay off as many of them as you can yeah it's weird um i mean i've I've been getting the sort of MAGA people in my responses all day in between, you know, a much higher percentage of people who actually do have empathy. And the weirdest thing to me is that they can't even look at my bio and see that I'm in the UK. It's like, what do I have to do with your political climate, really? So, yeah, it's weird. I don't know what they expect.

Because there's a very, there's a very real scenario, and I think, you know, the Verge and others had written about this, that revenue, directly revenue generating products take time to, you know, properly design, properly implement and to, you know, pick up support from people. And if you are losing your brand safety with your advertisers who are 85% of your current revenue, that's a weird position to be in. Like, it's a, I mean, it's a dangerous game to play. Yeah, I'm looking for a tweet right now because Elon just shared a tweet right before we went on air. And he said Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups, pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with the content moderation. And we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up. They're trying to destroy free speech. America. So, I mean, he is right that the content moderation policies haven't changed, but he is laying off lots of people in the ad group. And, yeah, and, you know, content moderation right is, it's not AI driven, right? It's not machine learning. It's, you know, there's elements of that to it, like anything in tech, but it's a manual job that real people are doing. And if you're laying off people that do that, then stuff's not going to get checked in the way that it should. And I suspect that he, it's potentially quite likely that concessions will have to be made by him in order to, you know, appease brand advertisers in certain ways, that some of these people who are very jubilant and joyful about this might have a very quick turn of heart about those decisions.

right we'll see let me ask you two more questions if I can sure first one what do you think what's your view of what the future of Twitter is going to look like now uh heavy focus on direct revenue generating products in in the short to midterm right right well we said that but like successful not do you think that like where does this end where does this go with Elon Yeah, I mean You can't really say it, but like, what's your hunch? I don't have a crystal ball. Yeah, I really don't know.

I think I wouldn't be surprised if more advertisers pull their revenue because if we're honest, there's other places they're happy to put it, right? Twitter has never been for most big advertisers. Yeah, this is our like number one thing. thing that we're going to put all of our money into it. It just hasn't been that. So if there's if there's risk or there's turbulence, there's instability, they'll they'll shift it around. They'll move it wherever else. Yeah, you know, experimental advertising in the metaverse or whatever Zuckerberg's doing. I don't know. Like, you know, there's options. Right. So I would I would not be surprised

if that trend continues of advertising revenue dropping, I'm not confident that a push on direct revenue products via users will pick up at the same pace that ad revenue may drop. It's a dangerous game to be playing. Right. Finally, how are you feeling and what's next for you? I'm pretty zen. I'm pretty optimistic.

It's just in my nature. So I did not expect my tweet to do that many numbers. So there's a lot of goodwill there. There's been recruiters in my inbox. There's been CEOs in my inbox. There's been all kinds of things, referrals, whatever else. Like I'm not short of options for what I want to decide to do next. Well, my personal beliefs are very much in building trust, building empathy into the internet,

building open community products that as many people can use and have a great experience with. I think we need to get back to that, that sort of unrealized potential that we all had in the earlier days of the internet, your late 90s and the early 2000s, when everything seemed to be a lot more open and protocol-based. and people operated with a lot more empathy. Yes. We need to get back to that. That's one of the things I thought as I was scrolling through Twitter today. It was like, oh, like, you might not agree with people.

You might think Elon's going to do a good job with Twitter. And I'm still open to the fact maybe he will. Wrote about it this week. There's some good things that he's doing. However, like the lack of empathy is tough to see. Let's end with by reading the tweet that you sent right before we got on the phone or a couple hours before. You're at, hi, everyone. I have coffee and the sun is shining. I appreciate you all. Life is good. Don't forget to smile. Put on some Stevie Wonder Prince, Joni Mitchell, Nas, or whatever your preference is and have a wonderful day. I just thought that attitude was so refreshing. And I mean, the one thing that I can tell is that, you know, the group of people who were laid off today, very talented folks. And the tech world is in need of solid talent. So eventually everyone will, we'll,

most people will land on their feet. And, you know, I know today's a tough day. I appreciate you taking some time to speak with us about it. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure. Great. And if people want to find you or hire you, it's the best way to do it.

So my Twitter is still up. I'm not planning on deleting it. It's S-B-K-C-R-N or my full name on LinkedIn, Simon Balmain. That's where I'm at. Always welcome for more recruiters or headhunting with interesting offers. offers. And we'll see, we'll see what happens. Hey, Simon, last question for you. Are you going to pay $8? Well, I mean, Twitter Blue never even launched in the UK. I only had it as a staff member, right? I see. So, you know, they'd have to sort that out first and then we'll see

where we're at. Okay, that's fair. Okay, thank you everybody for listening. This has been an emergency show. So a few bells and whistles, but thank you for being here with us. I thought it was important to get Simon's voice out on the feed, one of the collection that we're thrown out there recently. So it's great to have heard from him. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Thank you, Nick Guatany, as always, for doing the audio, although your finer prints aren't on this. So any problem was my problem this week with the audio. And then stay tuned in a couple of days or maybe even tomorrow. We're going to have Sagar and Jetty and Marshall Koslov from the Realignment, Promised Emergency Podcast about the U.S.

midterm, so just dropping content on the feed left and right. And thanks to you, thanks always for listening. Really appreciate you guys being here. All right, we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.