A short list of times in the day when Roger Lee contemplates layoffs: while waiting for someone to show up for a Zoom call. After his two young children have gone to sleep. At 5 AM, for his first meeting of the day.
Since starting Layoffs.fyi as a side project at the start of the pandemic, he has cataloged nearly 450,000 tech layoffs in a public spreadsheet, updating the list whenever he can find a few minutes.
Although Mr. Lee, 36, is constantly reading bad news, he remains a staunch optimist about technology. He acknowledges the pain that layoffs cause, but he also believes the industry will recover “100 percent.”
And Mr. Lee believes that talking openly about layoffs in the industry he loves is healthy. “The reduced stigma has the potential to be really positive,” he said. If people talk openly about layoffs, he argues, workers can find new jobs efficiently.
Layoffs.fyi is both a symptom and a cause of a cultural shift towards transparency about technology layoffs. Although Mr. While Lee would never argue that his site is the sole driver of this trend, he thinks it has helped workers put their own layoffs into context — and helped the public understand the recession. After tech companies struggled to bring in top talent during the pandemic, rapidly rising interest rates forced companies to make drastic cuts this year and last year.
“Having this website creates more transparency,” said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford. As so many Silicon Valley tech workers are being laid off, he added, “the stigma has almost completely evaporated.”
Over the past three years, Mr. Lee has become a useful resource. Recruiters scour the talent lists after major layoffs, and employees post their information when they lose their jobs.
Tim Sackett, who runs an IT and engineering firm, said looking at Layoffs.fyi saves him “an enormous amount of time” as it directs him to employees who are actively looking for jobs.
Media organizations, including The New York Times, often cite Layoffs.fyi as a source for the latest numbers on layoffs in the technology sector. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics shares data on layoffs across industries, it doesn’t track it in real time among venture-backed startups and tech companies. So Mr. Lee helps fill the gap.
“If you have fantastic government data on the state of the technology,” said Mr. Bloom, you don’t need a site like Mr. Lee’s. “But if that data doesn’t exist, Layoffs.fyi becomes invaluable.”
“There was just a complete data vacuum,” he added at the start of the pandemic. “It’s impressive that he was so early.”
Mr. Lee did not intend for this to happen. “It feels weird,” he said, “to be the bearer of bad news.” But he continued. He said his site gets at least a million views a month — and more than that during busy periods with lots of layoffs.
Mr. Lee has been following the layoffs on an informal basis since 2015 as he searched for talent to hire at his previous start-up. When the pandemic hit, he was on parental leave. He thought others might find his process helpful. “My original motivation was to be helpful,” he said. At that time, he added, he was struck by the sheer number of layoffs. “I thought, wow, seven in one week, that’s so many.”
Soon the layoffs – and the demands for updating the tracker – gained momentum. In April 2020, he said, “I spent all of my baby’s naps updating the site.”
Mr. Lee follows an informal set of self-imposed rules about which companies should post when. He makes a judgment on whether a company counts as “tech” – Buzzfeed: yes; Disney: no; — and sometimes sits on information until it’s reported in the news media.
“I don’t want to be a place where employees find out,” said Mr. Lee. “I get these ‘scoops,’ but try not to break news.”
“I don’t pretend these are hard and fast rules,” he added. But so far, he says, they allow him to provide information that is useful to people without accidentally causing panic.
Mr. Lee runs Layoffs.fyi as a hobby, and he spends money on it. In addition to his time, he estimates that he spends about $200 each month on the cost of his servers. He said he has refused to run ads even though he has been approached.
But the popularity of the site gave him the idea for a new company: Comprehensive.io, which tracks compensation in tech jobs on a public list.
He considers Comprehensive.io to be the inverse of Layoffs.fyi – it focuses on opportunities, not cuts. “I probably wouldn’t have gotten to the latter without the former,” he said.
“Part of what gave him the intuition that people would find the pay transparency data interesting is how interesting people found the layoff data,” said Teddy Sherrill, Mr. Lee’s old friend and founder of Comprehensive.io, which now has a staff of about a dozen people.
Although Mr. Lee is not yet 40, he has a long view on technology. It helps that he’s spent about half his life building websites.
When advertisers first approached Mr. Lee asking if they could place ads on a site he built as an adolescent, he said he didn’t want to talk on the phone.
“I was afraid that if I talked to them they would realize I was a 13-year-old,” he said.
In 2002, Mr. Lee and his childhood friend were running some of the most popular teen sites, according to Nielsen data published at the time.
One of the companies he co-founded was SubProfile, a social media service built on AOL’s instant messenger platform. In his senior year of high school, he said the site generated “six figures in revenue” and attracted at least seven million unique visitors per month. (Nothing he’s done since has exceeded that traffic, he said.)
He received his first paycheck from an advertiser in his parents’ home in the New York suburbs.
“It was definitely a surreal experience,” said Mr. Lee on his time as a teen entrepreneur. “That’s when I first fell in love with the internet.”
Mr. Lee sold another business, a study guide site, while a student at Harvard.
After graduating from college, he co-founded an internet ad sales start-up called PaperG in New Haven, Connecticut. Mr. Lee worked with the company for about seven years, which has since changed its name to Thunder and been sold to Walmart.
Krystal Benitez was hired in 2012 to Mr. Lee’s operations team at PaperG. At that time, the company and Mr. Lee had moved to San Francisco. Ms Benitez said Mr Lee often provided informal financial advice to staff, including several lunchtime lectures on investing and retirement planning. Personal finance is “a subject close to his heart,” she said. Indeed, Mr. Lee quickly founded a 401(k) start-up called Human Interest, which was valued at $1 billion by 2021.
“There may be no better way to impact people’s financial lives than through a job and how they are paid,” said Mr. Lee. He added that his interest in personal finance has animated his career, from Human Interest to Layoffs.fyi to his work now at Comprehensive.io.
Lee’s early fascination – and early success – with the internet continues to reinforce his optimism about the industry, and his vision that lives can be improved through technology.
“The economy has gone through two boom-and-bust cycles that I have been a part of,” he said. “Both times, technology came back stronger than ever.”
“I know it has its drawbacks,” he said of the internet. But, he added, “The positives are so, so positive.” He believes that human qualities, including our best impulses, are magnified online.
“You might think that the person behind Layoffs.fyi would be a cynical character,” said Tyler Bosmeny, a classmate of Mr. Lee’s, who was PaperG’s first employee and has invested in his companies ever since. But, he said, Mr. Lee is “the most optimistic person I know.” He added that Mr. Lee often sees thorny issues as data problems that can be solved with technology.
“The most hysterical thing,” Mr Bosmeny added, is that “this was his idea to take a break.”
