The company behind celebrity videos has laid off a quarter of its workers

Cameo, the company that lets you pay a celebrity to record a custom message or file Hop on a video call with youannounced that it was laying off 87 people, or about a quarter of its staff, according to the information. According to the report, employees received the news at a comprehensive meeting on Wednesday.

Company co-founder and CEO Stephen Galanis says the layoffs are a “correction of course” after Cameo has grown exponentially during the pandemic. The company went “from just over 100 to nearly 400” employees during the shutdown, according to Galanis. statement for diverse. Since then, he says, “market conditions have changed rapidly.” early 2021, diverse This has been reported The company’s revenue was 4.5 times higher in 2020 than it was in 2019. Galanis told the outlet that the success was in part because many actors switched to the platform after other projects were suspended, and they expected they would continue.

That prediction didn’t seem to work out entirely, given the company is now significantly reducing its workforce.

on TwitterGalanis asked other companies to hire “Cameo Fameo” members who had been laid off. While it feels nice, the tone is… awkward, to say the least. Executives say their company is like family and then let a large part of the employees go Unfortunately, nothing newIt is always uncomfortable to see corporate culture collide with the realities of capitalism. But using a nice name for your workers in the context of publicly announcing layoffs isn’t likely to soften that blow.

(Also: I understand that CEOs may experience an emotional burden when letting people go – they’ve let down the people who put their livelihoods in their care. But maybe they shouldn’t call it a “hard day in the office,” that it’s probably much worse for For people who have already lost their jobs).

But Galanis is not necessarily known for his tact; In March he It said That Web3 was like Europe’s colonization of the Americas, and made an analogy about the bead trade of Manhattan. This was, apparently, intended to make Web3 seem like a good thing. In his statement to diverse On layoffs, Galanis said he wanted to make sure the company had “the time and space to nurture new business segments like Cameo for Business, Represent and web3.” Tuesday, the company Announced her latest project Cameo for Business; Partnership with Snap, Inc where advertisers will be able to hire Cameo artists to appear in ads on Snapchat.