When Noah says, "everyone is replaceable", he really means it.
Yesterday, he fired half of AppSumo, despite the company is profitable and growing.
Here is Noah's m.o. with AppSumo:
1) Attract and hire people by paying them above market salary and promising equity.
2) New employees grow the company by building systems, automating inefficient processes, creating new lines of business, etc.
3) Once systems are built and operating efficiently; fire staff before equity vests.
4) Rinse, repeat, wash.
Entrepreneurs like this give startups a bad name. It's sad to see so many people celebrate him as a startup role model.
The reason he was fired from Facebook because he leaked internal features to the press and blogged about them. Yet he still seems unapologetic "I don’t think what I did was that wrong since the marketing team did not do anything to promote our new features."