After acquiring its rival food delivery app Postmates in December, Uber appears to have moved to trim the company’s workforce as it consolidates its operations. The company laid off 185 Postmates staff on Thursday, The New York Times reports, with the layoffs being part of a broader shift that’ll also see most of Postmates’ executive team depart, including its CEO Bastian Lehmann.

According to the Times, some Postmates vice presidents and other executives will leave with multi-million-dollar exit compensation packages whereas some rank and file employees may see reduced compensation packages. The 185 laid-off employees sum up to 15% of Postmates’ total headcount.

As it looks, while Uber has said that Postmates will remain a separate brand, much of the infrastructure behind the food delivery service and Uber’s own Uber Eats service will be run by Uber’s long-time Vice President of Delivery, Pierre Dimitri Gore-Coty. 

The most noteworthy news from the Times’ report is that Postmates’ founder and longtime CEO Bastian Lehmann will depart after a decade with the company from scratch to a $2.65 billion exit to Uber. 

Lehmann co-founded Postmates in 2011 and has led the company as its CEO ever since. As CEO, he led the company to raise over $760 million in venture funding on the route towards its sale to Uber.

Under Lehmann’s leadership, Postmates grew to become a top food delivery player in the US market but couldn’t match the market shares of rivals DoorDash and Uber Eats. To that, the company apparently saw consolidation as the best way to go and got sold to Uber.

Before its sale, Postmates was actually headed for a public listing and had already filed confidentially for one before holding it off later. 

As to finances, Postmates posted $321 million in revenue in 2019 and a net loss of $420 million in the same year. In the first half of 2020, the company posted $267 million in revenue and a net loss of $105 million. 

Although Lehmann’s departure seems abrupt, it wouldn’t be surprising and much worse for him, at least monetary-wise. Before its sale to Uber, Lehmann seld a 3.3% stake in Postmates, implying that he got a haul of over $87 million from Uber’s $2.65 billion all-stock acquisition of the food delivery company he founded.

Photo: Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann, credit: Postmates

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