Current and former employees at Medium say CEO Ev Williams' internal memo in April on the company's shifting culture led to a mass exodus of non-editorial staff
In April, Medium CEO Ev Williams wrote a memo to his staff about the company's shifting culture in the wake of a challenging year. Tweets: @nmasc_ , @om , @nmasc_ , @martinsfp , and @caseynewton Tweets: Natasha / @nmasc_ : In April, Medium CEO Ev Williams wrote a memo about the company's culture. Several employees argue the undertone of the memo has paved way for an unsafe, “nod-and-smile” work environment, triggering more exits. Scoop by me: https://techcrunch.com/... @om : Medium has 179 employees. (After the exits.) Ahem! https://twitter.com/... Natasha / @nmasc_ : There's a ton of other stuff in this story, including a history of racist tension at Medium, lack of transparency, and editorial chaos (h/t @caseynewton) “I don't feel like I needed the memo to really understand their true colors,” one engineer said. https://techcrunch.com/... Martin Sfp Bryant / @martinsfp : “'Those departing allege that Williams is trying to perform yet another reset of company strategy, at the cost of its most diverse talent.” https://techcrunch.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : “Of the 241 people who started the year at Medium, some 50% of that pool are now gone.” — Another story about an internal culture memo leading to an exodus, from @nmasc_ https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Medium has been through this cycle before: nearly all its sites were in upheaval back in 2015 with employees reportedly silent under NDA (sources described major upheavals and NDA-enforced quiet), and in early 2021 the company offered buyouts to everyone on its editorial staff as it pivoted from publishing its own magazines to supporting independent writers on the platform (editorial-wide buyout offer). The April culture memo from CEO Ev Williams landed right after that buyout round — and instead of stabilizing things, current and former employees tell TechCrunch it set the tone for an unsafe, 'nod-and-smile' environment that pushed out non-editorial staff.
The scale matters: reporting cited by Om Malik puts headcount at 241 at the start of the year and 179 after the exits, meaning roughly half the company left during the year. A year later, the churn arc closes with Williams handing the CEO role to Tony Stubblebine, after a tenure critique framed Medium as caught between Substack and better-funded publishers like BuzzFeed and Vice.
First-order effects
- Medium's operating staff is gutted: with editorial already bought out in March and non-editorial employees now departing en masse, the people who run payments, partnerships, and infrastructure for independent writers are largely gone, leaving a 179-person company to execute the pivot.
- Remaining employees describe a 'nod-and-smile' culture where dissent is unsafe — meaning Williams' own leadership team now gets filtered information from a workforce afraid to push back.
Second-order effects
- With both editorial and operations hollowed out within weeks of each other, Medium's platform-for-independent-writers strategy loses execution capacity exactly when Substack and funded publishers like BuzzFeed and Vice are competing for the same writers — retention of top creators becomes harder with thinner support staff.
- A company at half its headcount faces pressure to cut costs further or raise capital on weakened terms, narrowing Williams' strategic options for the rest of his tenure.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across 2015, 2017's third-of-staff layoffs, 2021's buyouts, and this exodus shows a founder-led company unable to hold a strategy long enough for staff trust to accumulate — ending in the founder's own exit from the CEO seat, a reminder that culture failures compound into leadership failure.
- If the successor can't break the churn cycle, Medium risks becoming a case study in how repeatedly pivoting a creator platform destroys the internal stability needed to serve creators at all.
The trend: Creator platforms that lurch between strategies — Medium pivoting repeatedly over a decade while Substack and funded rivals close in — burn through employee trust faster than they can rebuild strategy, until the founder himself is forced out.