Video game coaching marketplace Metafy cuts 23% of staff despite doubling revenue

techcrunch.com:

Metafy, a marketplace for video game coaching, laid off 23% of its staff last week, primarily impacting product, design and engineering teams, founder Joshua Fabian confirmed in an e-mail to TechCrunch. The layoff impacted 12 full-time employees. A Notion page has been created for those looking for their next jobs.

Metafy has raised over $30 million in known funding from Tiger Global, Seven Seven Six, Forerunner, DCM and others. Layoffs were preceded by leadership team pay cuts, Fabian said.

“I’m not crazy about the ivory tower bullshit. The cuts impacted roles that once made sense to the business but are now hard to justify. Nobody laid off has done anything wrong, and it’s not a reflection on their work ethic,” Fabian wrote in an e-mail to TechCrunch. “The needs of the business have simply changed as it’s grown and evolved over the last two years.”

Everyone impacted, Fabian says, has been offered three months of severance pay and extended health care regardless of tenure. For people who were at Metafy for less than a year, equity cliffs have been lifted. The startup also provided a subscription to LinkedIn pro.

Metafy’s mobile (iOS and Android) teams were most impacted by the workforce reduction, as the company says it now wants to build on React Native, a single code base that doesn’t require two separate iOS and Android teams.

As for what went wrong, it’s a similar story for many startups adjusting to the “new normal” of a more disciplined environment. Metafy last raised its Series A round in February 2022, “when things were rosy,” per Fabian, who planned to raise a Series B round months later.

“If you were fundraising last year, priorities were GMV and growth, not unit economics or revenue. There’s a new normal, if you