Wall Street Cheered. Your Team Is Watching.

Last Thursday, Jack Dorsey cut nearly half of Block’s workforce. 4,000 people. One announcement. The company wasn’t in trouble — gross profit was up 24%, Cash App growing, business accelerating by every measure that matters

Wall Street surged 23% in after-hours. Roughly $1.5 million in enterprise value per eliminated role. Dorsey called it vision: “100 people + AI = 1,000 people.” He also said he expects every other company to follow.

He’s probably right. And that’s the part worth paying attention to.

A few weeks ago I was in a room with early-stage founders. At some point the conversation turned to teams, and one founder mentioned that he’d stood up in front of his entire company and told them — plainly, calmly — that most of them wouldn’t be there in a year.

He said it like it was obvious. The room nodded. A few people looked uncomfortable. Nobody pushed back.

I keep thinking about that room.

The question I want to put to you isn’t whether to cut. It’s what’s actually driving it.

Because reaction and decision can look identical from the outside. Both produce memos. Both get applause from investors. Both come with a narrative about the future. But they start from very different places — and a year from now, the difference shows up in your team.

Dorsey’s move may be exactly what he says it is. Or it may be, as one Wharton professor noted publicly, AI-washing — cuts that were coming anyway, repackaged for a market that rewards the story. Block spent $68 million on a company party five months before the layoffs. Make of that what you will. The point isn’t to relitigate Dorsey’s call. The point is the question underneath it: *are you making this decision from clarity, or from somewhere else?*

“Survival of the fittest” sounds like strategy. It’s the kind of thing that lands well in a board deck and travels fast on LinkedIn.

But when you cut 40% of your team, you’re not just adjusting headcount. You’re telling the 60% who remain exactly who you are. They’re watching — not just what you did, but how you did it, and who you were in the process.

Are the people left people who believe in what you’re building? Or are they just people who are good at surviving — which is a genuinely different skill than building something worth working on?

And here’s the one that doesn’t get asked enough: are you cutting with real intention, or are you cutting what’s easy to cut?

In most organizations, the easiest people to remove are the ones without loud advocates. The ones doing work that doesn’t show up in a dashboard. Sometimes that’s dead weight. Sometimes that’s the connective tissue of the whole operation, and you won’t know it’s gone until six months later when things stop moving the way they used to.

Fast forward a year. The team is smaller. You’re leaner. Now: who’s still there, and why?

Not just who performed on the metrics you had. Who fits the company you’re actually trying to build — the one that exists in your head when you’re thinking clearly, not the one that exists in last quarter’s data?

High performers who don’t share where you’re going aren’t a competitive advantage. They’re a different kind of problem, one that’s harder to see until it’s expensive to fix.

Here’s the thing that stays with me:

If you only keep the obvious talent — the names anyone would poach, the people every competitor is already chasing — what exactly makes your company the place they choose?

The next 18 months are going to put real pressure on founders. Some of it will be legitimate. Some of it will be noise dressed up as urgency. The ones who come out the other side with something genuinely great won’t necessarily be the ones who moved fastest or cut deepest. They’ll be the ones who knew what they were building, and made their people decisions from that place.

Everyone else will have a lean team too.

The difference will be everything.

*If this landed — or stirred something you’re sitting with — I’d be glad to hear it. This conversation is just getting started.*