Stripe, headquartered in South San Francisco on Oyster Point Boulevard, told staff on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, that it was laying off 300 workers.
Courtesy of Google Streetview
Stripe, a payments technology juggernaut and the Bay Area’s second-most valuable startup, suddenly laid off 300 workers Monday.
The South San Francisco company, which makes online and in-person payment processors, announced the cuts in an internal memo from Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh. Business Insider published the memo, and Stripe spokesperson Casey Becker confirmed its authenticity to SFGATE.
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McIntosh wrote that the company’s “business performance continues to be strong” and said Stripe plans to grow its workforce by 17% to 10,000 by year’s end — but first, a few hundred people are losing their jobs. By Tuesday, laid-off workers had already begun flocking to LinkedIn.
The executive wrote that “there were several team-level changes needed to make sure we have the right people in the right roles and locations to execute against our plans.”
Rather than roll out cuts throughout the year, McIntosh wrote that Stripe’s leaders were asked to “pull these decisions forward” to all happen at once. Most of the cuts have hit workers in product, engineering and operations roles, the memo said. McIntosh thanked the laid-off workers, writing: “Our confidence that this is the right business decision doesn’t make it easier for those who are leaving or those losing valued teammates.”
As a privately held startup, most of Stripe’s financials aren’t part of the public record. But the company has been in a topsy-turvy stretch since 2022, when it laid off more than 1,000 workers. At the time, CEO Patrick Collison blamed the economic climate and fears of an upcoming recession. Stripe also cut its valuation multiple times, shrinking the value of employees’ shares in the startup.
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Stripe CEO Patrick Collison speaks onstage at the Wired25 Summit on Nov. 8, 2019, in San Francisco.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED
Last year saw a resurgence, with Stripe boosting its valuation back up to around $70 billion, per Bloomberg. That’s below its 2021 peak of $95 billion but hardly chump change: Among the country’s privately held tech startups, only Texas-headquartered SpaceX and San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI are worth more.
Stripe used to be headquartered in San Francisco too but moved its main office south in 2021 after fighting a 2018 proposition in the city that taxes businesses and uses the money to fight homelessness. The startup also has a second headquarters in Ireland, the home country of co-founders Patrick and John Collison, plus offices in London, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere.
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As of Tuesday morning, California’s Employment Development Department had not received a WARN mass layoff notice from Stripe, which is generally required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act if a company cuts more than 50 jobs in the state.
Work at Stripe or another Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
