In 2022, Yavqo made one of the most difficult decisions in our history: reducing our workforce by approximately 10%.
The decision affected teams across the company and followed a period of rapid growth, changing market conditions, and a broader effort to simplify how Yavqo operates.
This was not a decision we made lightly.
Why we made this change
Over the previous several years, Yavqo had expanded quickly across products, engineering, infrastructure, and new areas of technology.
That growth created new opportunities, but it also increased complexity across the company.
By 2022, it had become clear that we needed to operate with greater focus. Some teams had overlapping responsibilities, some projects no longer matched our highest priorities, and parts of the organization had grown faster than the systems supporting them.
Reducing the size of the company was part of a broader effort to address that.
Our goal was to create a simpler organization with clearer ownership, fewer layers, and more resources concentrated around the work we believed would matter most over the long term.
Supporting people leaving Yavqo
The most important part of this process was supporting the people whose roles were affected.
The employees leaving Yavqo had contributed to products, infrastructure, research, operations, and many other parts of the company. Their work helped build Yavqo into what it was at that point, and we remain grateful for those contributions.
We worked to provide affected employees with transition support, including severance, benefits where applicable, and resources to help them move into their next opportunity.
We also aimed to communicate decisions directly and respectfully, with managers speaking with affected employees individually wherever possible.
Becoming a more focused company
The workforce reduction was not simply about becoming smaller.
It was part of a wider effort to become more focused.
Following the changes, teams were asked to concentrate on a smaller number of priorities, simplify internal processes, and reduce work that did not directly support Yavqo's long-term strategy.
We also began reviewing how decisions were made across the organization, how teams collaborated, and where additional layers of complexity could be removed.
The intention was to give teams greater clarity and allow more resources to go toward the products and technologies with the greatest long-term potential.
Continuing to invest
Even as we reduced the size of the organization, Yavqo continued investing in areas we believed would shape the company's future.
That included artificial intelligence, infrastructure, developer technology, mapping, consumer software, and new computing experiences.
Making difficult changes in one part of the company did not mean stepping away from innovation.
Instead, it meant being more deliberate about where we invested and making sure our organization could support those investments sustainably.
Looking ahead
Periods of rapid growth can make companies more complex than they need to be.
In 2022, we recognized that Yavqo needed to change.
Reducing our workforce was a difficult part of that process, particularly because of the impact on colleagues who had helped build the company.
The responsibility that came with that decision was to make sure the changes resulted in a stronger, more focused organization.
Our priority moving forward was to keep building ambitious technology while operating with greater discipline, clarity, and long-term perspective.
