There is a certain vocabulary that has become standard in Silicon Valley when a company decides it needs fewer employees than it currently has. Words like "agility" and "focus" and "speed" tend to appear, often in the same sentence, as if the workers being let go had been the primary obstacles to all three.
The Trade Desk, the demand-side platform that has positioned itself as the thinking person's alternative to the walled gardens of Google and Meta, announced on Thursday that it would be reducing its global work force by 15 percent. Jeff Green, the company's chief executive, delivered the news in an email to staff members that was subsequently posted to The Current, the company's owned news site (a venue that, one imagines, does not often carry news of this particular flavor).
Mr. Green wrote that the cuts would allow the company to "move with greater agility, focus, ownership, and speed," and would "usher in our next phase of growth." The Trade Desk had employed approximately 3,900 people; the reduction amounts to roughly 585 positions.
The announcement arrived on the heels of an earnings report that disappointed Wall Street, with the company's stock falling 15 percent in after-hours trading Thursday. The company also offered guidance for the second quarter that analysts found, to use the technical term, lackluster.
The Trade Desk has spent years building a reputation as the sophisticated buyer's tool in the programmatic advertising marketplace, a company that brands and agencies turn to when they want to believe they are being more deliberate about where their digital dollars go. That positioning has served it well in an industry that has grown weary of opacity.
Whether 585 fewer employees will make the company more agile remains, as these things do, to be seen. The stock market, at least on Thursday evening, appeared to have its doubts.
Original story published in adweek.com: "The Trade Desk Sheds 15% of Staff on Heels of Lackluster Q2 Showing"