Ukrainian Allset lays off 30% of its team: CEO’s letter to employees

The Ukrainian developer of the food pre-ordering service Allset reduced its global team by 30%, laying off 29 employees. The startup’s founder and CEO, Stas Matviyenko, wrote about this decision on LinkedIn. Allset has offices in Ukraine and the US. It partners with over 8,000 restaurants in both countries. 

As Stas Matviyenko emphasized, it is part of the company’s restructuring because of the economic downturn caused, among other things, by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. AIN.Capital publishes the CEO’s letter.

Dear Allset Team,

On our All-Hands today, we shared that we made a difficult but prudent decision to adjust our strategy and reduce our workforce by 30% (29 people).

Despite our efforts to avoid layoffs, our leadership team concluded that such restructuring is necessary for our company given the current economic downturn.

Our team has done many initiatives to improve unit economics and operational efficiency. However, with the challenging market conditions and uncertainty ahead, we have to take all the possible measures to secure our financial position and extend our runway, including the optimization of our team size.

This is necessary to ensure a stronger company out of this economic downturn, but a painful outcome that impacts people who worked hard and devoted so much to the company.

Thanks to everyone at Allset, we’ve made great progress with our product and service, and we will continue delivering its high standards, focusing on areas and initiatives that impact our growth and improve our unit economics the most. Together with our senior team leaders, we identified the needed changes for each of their teams based on our new strategy and priorities.

Together, we went through very challenging times, including Covid and russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supporting each other and being a real family. Today, we will stand by our team and do our best to make this transition as smooth as possible. In addition to transition payment and extended benefits package, we allocate resources to ensure that our colleagues who are departing will find their next dream job soon.

To those leaving today — we are fortunate to have worked with such talented and motivated people and, I am extremely grateful for your contributions. It would be an honor to work with you again in the future.

To our team that is staying — I know it will be sad to say goodbye to your colleagues, and you may feel some uncertainty and have questions. Please be sure that it was a difficult but necessary decision to make to achieve our next milestone and build a stronger company we can all be proud of. In the next days, we will go through our strategy and plans together. Right now, let’s honor our departing team members’ contribution.

Sincerely,

Stas

Previously, we published an email titled “Economic Downturn” that Y Combinator sent to all its portfolio founders. The startup accelerator advised them to “plan for the worst,” as well as suggested cutting their expenses, extending their runways, or focusing on raising money.