Monday.com cut one in five of its people this week — about 630 jobs out of 3,000 — and the cofounder went on LinkedIn to make sure you understood it wasn’t what it looked like. His words: this “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.” Read that against the same filing, where the company says it’s trimming headcount to run “leaner” as it bets the whole product on its AI platform. And here’s the part that gives it away: Monday.com still projects up to 20% revenue growth this year. This isn’t a drowning company throwing weight overboard. It’s a growing one that opened a spreadsheet and decided 630 households were the thing slowing it down.
The layoff isn’t the new part. The memo is. Every one of these now ships with an executive who needs you to see the deeper vision, and the vision is always some version of leaner, more focused, embracing the new era. Amazon kept its buildings, cut its people, and called that discipline. This is the other flavor — growth that still finds a fifth of the staff expendable, narrated as a brave leap forward. And the tell isn’t even in the numbers anymore. It’s that Sam Altman, the guy selling the AI, admitted back in February that almost every company doing layoffs is blaming AI whether or not it’s actually about AI. When the man printing the money tells you the story is a costume, the story is a costume.
So the memo is the real product now. It exists so a shareholder skims “more focused operating model” instead of reading “630 people lost their income in one SEC filing.” Nobody’s hands were tied. Somebody chose 630. Somebody chose the 20% growth number and still swung the axe. Somebody opened a tab and typed three paragraphs about courage while other people found out by email. You don’t owe that post a thoughtful nod. The workers built the thing that’s still growing 20% — root for them. The memo can root for itself.