Yeah, those of us who got axed, many of us who also have mortgages and families, are just assholes with a political axe to grind that is disagreeable to your Ayn Rand worship or whatever.
The point I was making about Trump is this huge fucking black swan just landed, and everybody with money is snapping their wallets shut, and the rest of us can just go fuck ourselves and drop dead.
Local picture: the revenue model for online publishing is still broken, Medium is in the publishing business.
Big picture: Donald J Trump, and the potential to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody. Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.
In either case, reducing your burn rate by $10M per year is a smart move.
Newly ex-Median here. This was not a huge surprise. On the surface, this is a change in product strategy. The underlying story is the company positioning itself so it can survive an adverse environment if it needs to. It's hard to fault managers for dealing with that potential (and its hard to deny that the next 2-4 years could be really bad). Hopefully not, but it would be malpractice not to prepare.
So better to focus resources now than be walking dead in a year or so, jettison unnecessary products/projects, and hope for the best. It's a great product, and with time and luck, they'll sort out a good business model, but like the rest of the publishing world, they're still sorting things out.
Despite being one of those made redundant, I enjoyed being there, and wish them the best. On that note, you should ask yourself if you are prepared for winter, because winter is coming.