Opensea announced a RIF today. My heart goes out to all the talented folks impacted, and hope that most can land on their feet.

A RIF is always tough, but often necessary. I think that most companies in the space currently are bloated and would benefit from a 20-80% RIF (including giants like Coinbase). For many companies that are still finding PMF, headcount to fill potential future needs is often a mistake, both from a time-invested and burn¹. Without knowing exactly how many people work at Opensea, I’d guess this affects 100+ people.

Devin mentioned re-orienting around “Opensea 2.0” and building in public with the community in mind. I imagine that Opensea Pro hasn’t quite seen the traction they expected², so excited to see what 2.0 looks like. The 300mm on 13.2bn val round for Opensea was announced in Jan of 2022, though The Information reported in April 2023 that Tiger Global had internally marked their investment down 76% (~3bn val).

If you were affected and are interested in continuing to work in the space, please reach out. I’d love to help find the right company for you, regardless of whether it is in Framework’s portfolio.

¹ There are counterexamples here where anticipated needs were accurately forecasted and enabled a smoother transition during hypergrowth. Obviously do what’s right for your company, but personally have seen a lot of bloated companies.

² To be fair, NFT volumes have been down everywhere. I’m curious if Uniswap Labs has done any internal retros around their NFT product / how they are thinking about future directions.