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December 10, 2013 12:08 am GMT

Payments Startup Clinkle Lays Off A Quarter Of Its Staff [UPDATED: New Layoffs In Addition To 30Plus Who Already Left]

clinkleStealthy payments startupClinklewhich raised $25 million in outside funding before its product ever launched, has terminated around 25% of its staff (16 people), according to a report posted this morning byFortune. The news of the layoffs comes amid speculation that there’s internal trouble, and even potentially issues with Clinkle leadership, which has raised doubts about the company’s future. The news of the layoffs comes shortly after the unearthing of a scathing review of Clinkle operations and its founder, 22 year-old Lucas Duplan, which was left on Q&A site Quora in late November. Reportedly authored by two former employees, the post lists 31 ex-employees at the startup, though it didn’t clarify who among that list was terminated, versus those who quit or who may have been working part-time or had to return to school – or so points out Business Insider, which found the Quora post originally. Similar anonymously-posted lists of ex-staff have also showed up on web before, like this list on Pastebin. The anonymous Quora posters allege that they put in long workweeks, having been promised equity, but never received it. That post had to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt at the time, however, as it seemingly came from someone(s) with an axe to grind. However, combined with this new report, doubts about Clinkle grow. The company has already had a hard time keeping news of its goings-on under wraps, choosing to remain “stealthy” even as large-scale leaks, including screenshots of the interfaces and functionality emerged on sites like YouTube and Tumblr. And now it has tried to keep quiet on layoff news, only to have that leak out as well. (We reached out to Clinkle to provide comment, but the company has yet to respond to inquiries. See below for Clinkle’s response.) Fortune says there had been a plan to lessen the blow of the Clinkle layoff news by instead announced it alongside the news of high-profile new hires. The company had addedCOO Barry McCarthy formerly of Netflix, earlier this fall, and last week two of McCarthy’s former Netflixcolleagues joined,includingformer Walmart and Netflix exec Andy Rendich as Clinkle’s VP of operations, and Allison Hopkins, formerly of Palo Alto Networks and Netflix, as VP of talent. There was some hint from McCarthy that Clinkle needed work on its operations side of the business. As he told TechCrunch at the time, the company needed to build out

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/NN6B7zBS_Fc/

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