<aside> ℹ️ Earlier this week, Oyster Founder & CEO Tony Jamous sent the following letter to Oyster employees. To ensure clarity for readers outside of Oyster's internal team, this message has been lightly edited, including the removal of employee names and internal Oyster processes.
</aside>
Hello Oysters all around the world,
I am writing to share with you that unfortunately, today we are conducting a company-wide reorganization and removing a number of roles across Oyster.
I know this isn't easy news to process for anybody. I personally feel very sad that amazing people will leave Oyster, some of whom I’ve worked closely with, some of whom are my friends, some of whom have been part of the Oyster story since inception. It’s a hard reality to accept that they won’t be part of our next chapter.
Though necessary, this decision was not made lightly. As a leadership team, we’ve explored all of our options and have already pulled a number of levers to reduce costs. We left no stones unturned. Unfortunately, these cost savings measures were not enough to keep Oyster safe financially and thus guarantee that we can further our mission, requiring us to take immediate and decisive action in order to align our staffing costs with our strategic priorities and financial imperatives.
Prior to raising our Series C, we delivered incredible growth thanks to the powerful business you all created, buoyed by the acceleration of remote work and bullish capital markets. During our uncharted hypergrowth phase, we adopted an expansive company strategy–across growth, product, and operations–designed to capture market share at high velocity.
Since then, the macroeconomic environment has dramatically shifted, creating headwinds for many businesses, including Oyster. These headwinds have dampened our growth expectations and radically changed the fundraising environment, with only the most outstanding companies–those growing fast in a highly profitable way–being in a position to secure funding.
To adapt to our slower than expected growth trajectory in this new market, and to accelerate our path to profitability, we pivoted to an efficient growth strategy in the second half of 2022. This resulted in us pulling a number of levers to reduce costs, including the company-wide reorganization conducted in January 2023.
This year, we designed our 2023 growth targets and spending plans to be realistic, while minimizing the additional capital needed before reaching profitability, and maximizing our ability to fundraise. Unfortunately, despite significant progress in terms of efficient growth, automation, differentiation, and mission impact and while the various cost-savings measures we’ve implemented this year have been impactful, they will not be enough to keep Oyster safe financially and thus guarantee that we can protect and further our mission.
The combination of a tighter than ever funding environment and our current growth trajectory command that we right-size Oyster immediately to reduce our cash burn.
We have decided ****several leadership changes aimed at simplifying our reporting structure and rationalizing our leadership expenses. We have imagined an organizational structure that is more streamlined and that requires several leaders including me to widen their scope of responsibilities while, unfortunately, some other leaders will be departing Oyster. We wanted to look at the top first.
In addition to these Leadership changes, the Executive Team has taken a deep and careful look at the entire organization, to determine where we can operate more efficiently. Unfortunately, this has meant that for many functions, we have made the difficult decision to reduce both their scope of work and team size. Please know that this does not mean that we care any less about the functions impacted, only that we are not able to continue investing resources in those areas in the same way.
All Oysters whose roles have been impacted will have the opportunity to express interest in the roles we plan to hire in the remainder of 2023.
As with our previous reorganization, we are glad to be able to offer this process and hope to fill some of our future headcount with existing Oysters. However, we understand that there are not many open roles, and that many teammates will not find a suitable new role within Oyster. In such cases, we are prepared to support our impacted teammates in the most compassionate and human-centric way possible on the next step of their journey.