Pitch CEO Christian Reber shared the following note with all employees on September 14, 2022.

Dear Pitchers,

Two weeks ago, I brought my cofounders and leadership team together for a two-day offsite. We talked about the future of Pitch, and what’s worrying us. It’s increasingly clear that we’re heading into an extended recession, and that bringing Pitch into this new, difficult market environment in its current shape and at its current size is too risky. For that reason, we’ve made the painful decision to reduce the size of our team, and part ways with 59 Pitchers today.

I take full responsibility for this decision. We’re reaching out to everyone affected by these layoffs with an invitation to debrief with either myself, one of my co-founders, or another leader at Pitch. For those of you who are not directly affected, your manager will be in touch on Slack as soon as possible, and will then arrange to speak to you later in the day, once they have spoken to the people who are affected.

I’d like to transparently share how we’re managing this transition, give more context on why I’ve made this decision, and offer my thoughts on how we all move forward.

How we’ll manage this transition

Letting anyone go under these circumstances is intensely painful. As a leadership team, we hired all of you because we believe you’re the best in your fields, and we still do. We want to be as supportive as we possibly can throughout this transition, while giving you the space you need.

Here’s how we’re supporting every Pitcher leaving us today:

Your manager will share all the other specifics of the termination agreement and the support we’re offering, and will arrange handovers as needed in your meetings today. Everyone will continue to have access to Slack until 8pm Berlin time today, after which time we will create a dedicated Pitch alumni channel which you will be invited to join if you would like.

Why we’ve taken this step

Earlier this year, we were one of the first startups to pause hiring, and adapt our financial plan when market conditions started to decline. Since then, we’ve carefully tracked the market, and periodically reviewed the need for further action. When we met two weeks ago, we all agreed on the reality we’re facing: Like every startup, Pitch is now operating in a tough financial environment. In addition to the ongoing VC pullback, almost all technology companies globally are now aggressively cutting costs, which also affects software businesses like ours.

It’s increasingly difficult to make confident predictions right now, but one thing is clear: We need to prepare Pitch for an extended economic downturn, in order to give ourselves the best chance of emerging as a healthy, thriving business on the other side. We’ve therefore decided to extend our runway by two more years until the end of 2026. The painful truth is that changing the size of our team is the only option that allows us to do that.

In the midst of all this uncertainty, we’re still working on our product-market fit and our go-to-market motion. It might seem like this decision disrupts those efforts, but we believe it actually presents a new chance to make progress on them. We will reset, focus, act on the lessons we’ve learned, and double down on building the best product we can.