Fallout takes hold: Seesmic publicly lays off 7
Loic Le Meur, CEO and founder of video community service Seesmic, announced publicly on Friday that the company is laying off seven people from the start-up. Citing "market conditions and the recession," Le Meur disclosed that most of the let-go staffers are "behind-the-scenes" people who were building out the service. Le Meur said, "The worst is, we love them all."
He says that "Seesmic is moving on and will continue to innovate and provide a stable platform." The company has "years ahead" of funding to keep things moving, he said.
Seesmic also owns the Twitter and Friendfeed client Twhirl.
Le Meur's style of announcing this change in his company is unusually open, but it is likely the beginning of a series of similar announcements, some more public than others, about restructuring and retrenchment in start-ups. The founder of a different four-person company, whom I met with Friday, told me he had just cut salaries at his company in order to stretch the company's "runway" of survivability on the money it currently has in the bank.
See Le Meur's confessional video on the topic, below:
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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Of course, blame the market when you can.