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Firing Season: 171 Layoffs At 9 Web Companies

cleaver.jpgAll those memos from VCs about trimming the fat -- startups took them very seriously. Several companies announced layoffs this week, and it will just be the beginning. We already reported Heavy.com's layoffs; here's a roundup of the others from the week that was.

  • Pandora: The popular music site cut 20 jobs, reducing its ranks from 140 to 120.
  • Hi5: The social net that's particularly big in Spain cut 10-15, according to TechCrunch. Ironically, the news came a day after a big feature in Fortune on how they were gunning for Facebook.
  • Zivity: The "adult-community" cut 8 of its 22 employees. The company, funded to the tune of $8 million, has yet to officially open its doors yet -- that's expected in 2009.
  • Adbrite: Probably the only layoff story where you can let yourself feel a little bit of schadenfreude. The ad market place, founded by F*ked Company's Phillip Kaplan, cut 40 of its 100 employees. If you can believe it, the company says the cuts have nothing to do with performance.
  • Seesmic: This was actually last Friday. The uber-hyped "Twitter for video" startup cut 7 jobs. CEO Loic Lemeur explained the move in a Seesmic-powered video, seen here.
  • Redfin: Hot web real estate firm cut 20. We discussed it here.
  • SearchMe: The visual search engine that sorts webpages like album covers on iTunes cut 20% of its staff, or about 10 jobs, VentureBeat first reported. This is another Sequoia, which raised a whopping $25 million back in March.
  • Zillow: Another web real estate firm, just announced that it was cutting 25% of staff -- which was reported to be 155, so that's about 39 jobs.

Add it altogether, just from these 9 companies, that's about 171 jobs lost in a week. Those numbers will get much bigger soon, particularly when Yahoo finally rolls out its cuts.

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