From team-building vacations to ruthless layoffs Exposing the insider story of Poka’s layoffs, comparable to ‘The Hunger Games

Unveiling Poka's Layoffs Witnessing a Corporate 'Hunger Games' from Team-Building Retreats to Heartless Cutbacks

Author: Inbar Preiss, Inbar Preiss, DL News; Translation: Song Xue, LianGuai

• After being fired, LianGuairity employees were asked to attend a company retreat.

• Employees pointed out that the executives paid themselves hefty salaries.

• A spokesperson for LianGuairity called this situation a “challenging step” for the company.

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In the week before the parent company of Polkadot, LianGuairity Technologies, went to Mallorca in the Mediterranean for its annual team-building vacation, its 385 employees received shocking news: the company is laying off most of its employees.

However, several employees pointed out that since flights had already been booked, departing employees were still expected to attend the team-building activities at the Playa Cala Domingos resort in Ibiza from October 9th to 13th.

A representative from LianGuairity stated that the decision to proceed with the activities was made after the layoff announcement.

The employees were supposed to have a fun week with speeches, workshops, and parties, but it turned into discussions about LianGuairity’s dissolution, who would survive the layoffs, and what would happen next.

“It’s a surreal, sick joke,” said one LianGuairity employee who attended the retreat. “It feels a bit like The Hunger Games.”

Internal disputes

LianGuairity Technologies is a blockchain infrastructure company responsible for developing the Polkadot blockchain.

According to several current and former employees, as funds diminished and employees criticized top management for paying themselves hefty salaries, Polkadot and LianGuairity are now embroiled in internal conflicts.

Eric Wang, former Head of Strategic Growth at LianGuairity, who left the company in January, stated, “The executives are highly paid, but they haven’t produced much in terms of results.”

For one of the most hyped projects in the DeFi space, the situation has taken a dramatic turn.

In 2020, Polkadot launched with a stellar background and promising prospects. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, created Polkadot to address the limitations of the blockchains he helped create, such as scalability issues.

Over the next three years, talented developers and DeFi enthusiasts flocked to Polkadot, which reached a peak market capitalization of $54 billion in November 2021, consistently ranking among the top 10 companies in the cryptocurrency field.

“A challenging step”

In response to a request for comment, LianGuairity neither confirmed nor denied the layoffs nor addressed management’s salary issue.

LianGuairity expressed its anticipation for the continued presence of participants in its network and further adoption of the Polkadot blockchain. A spokesperson stated that the company is committed to the development of a distributed Polkadot and called this situation a “challenging step” for the company.

The spokesperson for LianGuairity said in an email statement, “We appreciate our team, who played a crucial role in achieving what we have today. Although it was a challenging step for LianGuairity, it was a necessary one for Polkadot.”

Given LianGuairity’s commitment to expanding Polkadot’s user base, employees were caught off guard by the layoffs, and they requested anonymity to protect their identities during such a sensitive moment.

Employees stated that only the core engineering, developer relations, ecosystem success, and Asian teams were not laid off.

Team-Building Activities in Spain

These issues should have been addressed during the team-building activities in Spain. However, team members found it difficult to shake off the pressure caused by the situation.

“It was promoted as if they would have a say in the decentralized plan,” one attending employee said. “Some people even cried during their presentations. Many people left early.”

According to several employees who attended the event, Wood was absent, which angered and confused many. Employees claimed that both the founder of Polkadot and LianGuairity were absent from the company-wide event where layoffs were announced.

In interviews with employees, they believe that Wood made this decision.

One employee said, “Many employees believe that he did not clarify his priorities and did not assist in promoting Polkadot.”

Lagging Behind Competitors

Employees also mentioned that Fahmi Syed, the Chief Financial Officer of LianGuairity, left the company the day before the announcement of the layoffs. Syed’s LinkedIn profile still shows him as the company’s CFO.

Wood founded LianGuairity Technologies to aid in the commercialization of Polkadot’s network. It plays a similar role to IOHK, a commercial enterprise that develops the Cardano blockchain.

However, Polkadot has fallen behind its competitors. While Ethereum has risen by 32%, Polkadot’s DOT cryptocurrency has dropped by about 18% this year.

Polkadot’s DOT token has experienced a sharp decline during the bear market in the past 12 months.

Some of LianGuairity’s funding comes from the Web3 Foundation, which is another organization founded by Wood. According to an employee from LianGuairity, the Web3 Foundation also announced layoffs, affecting around 40% of its employees.

According to recruiting website SignalHire, the group is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, and has 100 to 200 employees.

“The company spends money like it’s still in a bull market.”

On October 10, 2023, LianGuairity posted an article on its official X account, stating that it is “gradually phasing out its marketing functions” to promote the decentralized development of the Polkadot ecosystem.

LianGuairity did not publicly acknowledge the layoffs, but shortly after the X post, an employee from LianGuairity’s news office stated that the company will be experiencing “personnel changes” in the coming months.

According to LianGuairity employees, the company had to lay off staff due to cash depletion. They stated that LianGuairity aggressively recruited over the past 12 months, resulting in financial difficulties.

One employee stated that the company’s management should have better cost control during a bear market. But “the company spends money like it’s still in a bull market,” the employee said.

Others blamed the layoffs on the high salaries paid to executives, claiming that executives usually receive over 1 million dollars in cash.

An employee said, “Once, a vice president of digital marketing accidentally sent his salary to the entire company via email, revealing that his income was about 700,000 dollars.”

In reality, employees are concerned about what will happen to the Polkadot ecosystem, as some of them have been working on this project for seven years.

One employee said that the biggest concern for employees is that without LianGuairity as a guiding force, talent will flee the Polkadot ecosystem.

“Decentralizing power sounds great, but if there’s no unified strategy or no one in charge, no one knows what will happen,” the employee said.

On the other hand, Wang believes that layoffs might be positive in the long run. “Getting rid of all these employees and decentralizing power can only be a good thing because the bar has been set very low,” he said.

Others involved in the Polkadot ecosystem seem to have completely withdrawn.

According to the same source, the Web3 Foundation was supposed to participate in a team-building event organized by LianGuairity but canceled the flight after the layoffs. “No one attended,” the employee said.

And currently, there is no timetable for the layoffs, so LianGuairity’s employees remain in a state of uncertainty. But most importantly, employees still can’t explain the terrible timing of LianGuairity’s mass layoffs.

“Why fire everyone right before the team-building event?” an employee said. “It’s a mess.”

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