Spotify’s Layoffs and Uber Joins S&P 500: Tech Grows Up

Where’s the cake? Today marks The Information’s 10th birthday, which is a milestone for any news startup, and even more so for one that has never raised outside funding. (That’s what you call bootstrapping.) Those of us who’ve been here through most or all of the past decade truly have empathy for tech startups. You labor in obscurity until one day you don’t (hopefully!). Still, what’s striking today is that a lot of the young startups of a decade ago are now mature companies, as the news of the past day or so demonstrates.

Take Uber, which was just a preschooler in 2013 but today is a profitable enterprise whose stock, we learned on Friday, will be added to the S&P 500 index later this month. That news sent its stock up to nearly the $60 mark—it last traded there in early 2021—giving it a market capitalization of about $121 billion. Then there’s Spotify, a feisty seven-year-old when The Information started. Now 17, it’s having to deal with the harsh realities of grown-up life. For instance, the music-streaming service said today it was cutting 17% of its workforce, the third time this year it has had to trim staff. Spotify started the year with just over 10,000 employees, and once the latest round is concluded, it will have 7,671, about where the workforce was at the end of 2021.