Fintech Block fired 931 people, about 8% of the company staff, according to a leaked message from the company that was seen by Techcrunch.
The news was announced to staff in an e-mail from Block’s co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey told the staff that Block will “make some organic changes on Tuesday, including eliminating roles and starting the consultation process in where necessary in countries.”
These are the latest changes to the HIT Block, Dorsey’s Financial Services Giant who owns Cash App and Square. The company offers mobile payment services for consumers, as well as Point-of-Sale hardware and software for companies.
In the e -mail, Dorsey explained that Block cuts the roles into three wide buckets. The first he lists is that 391 people are cut for ‘strategy’ reasons.
The second and largest bucket, 460 people, is to ‘performance reasons’, in which Dorsey explains that Block takes employees who score a “under” rating on the internal performance of the company, whether there were trending to it.
The third bucket is managers, of whom 80 are cut to flatten the hierarchy of Block to “Innercore+4”, which refers to Dorsey’s direct reports and then four levels of direct reports afterwards, according to a well -known source. Dorsey also said that 193 managers are moved to individual employees.
The E -mail from Dorsey denies that the dismissals are for financial reasons or to replace employees with AI. He said earlier that Block cuts the roles because of the shifting of strategic needs, while he “sticks the bar and acts faster for performance.”
Dorsey also noted that Block 748 closes open roles with the company, with the exception of those advanced to an offer phase, critical operational roles and important leadership roles, among other things.
Block underwent large dismissals for the last time in January 2024, when it cut about 1,000 roles. From December 2024, the outfit had around 11,300 employees worldwide, according to the The last 10k application from the company.
Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Below you will find the entire e -mail that Dorsey sent on Tuesday to block employees. The grammar and the size of this text have changed somewhat to protect the sources it shared with Techcrunch. The e -Mail follows:
Hello everyone.
Today we are making a few org changes, including eliminating roles and starting the consultation process in countries where necessary. I want to give you all the right facts.
As I said at the last block, there are three areas that we would like to tackle:
- Strategy: Reducing teams that are not a strategy and resolve our discipline ratios.
- Performance: saying goodbye to people with a “below” or trending to “below”.
- Hierarchy: Driving our org to a maximum depth of innercore+4
What that translates into real numbers of people:
- Hierarchy: 80 managers (with 193 moving individual contribution)
We also close all 748 rolls that we had opened with the exception of:
- Roles progressed to offer the stage.
- Critical operational roles
None of the above points tries to hit a specific financial target, replace people with AI or change our staff limit. They are specific to our needs regarding the strategy, increase the bar and handle performance faster, and complete our organization so that we can move faster and with less abstraction.
Why do all this at the same time instead of over time? We are at the back of our promotions, and that is not fair for the people who work here or the company. If we know, we have to move and there has not been enough movement. We have to move to help us meet and stay ahead of the transformational moment at which our industry is located.
This is the most difficult part of my work and I fight hard for one of these considerations. We must have a very high beam of correctness for us to take every action, which needs iteration and time to get good. I always balance this with the fact that everyone here, and those who leave, have equity in our company. It is my job to increase that value. We believe that this will help us to concentrate and implement it better to do that exactly.
We work to give everyone clarity so quickly, with so much context and support, possible. You will soon receive an e -mail about what this means for you. If there are areas where you think we can do better, send me a note. Direct feedback makes us better, and I always trade when it makes sense.
Thank you to everyone who left us. I am grateful and grateful for you and your work that has built us so far. We will continue to honor that by increasing our value for our customers, and therefore for all our shareholders, including you.
Thank you,
grille
This story was updated on Tuesday at 4.28 pm to record the full e -mail announced the dismissal.