Three short lines were all it took. Hours after HubSpot announced it was cutting about 660 jobs, co-founder Dharmesh Shah posted a message on LinkedIn to the people who had lost them.
“My personal thanks to all of the people that HubSpot parted ways with today,” he wrote. “You helped make HubSpot the company it is. Best wishes with the next chapter.”
The reaction was swift. Shah later added an update to the post: “My original post was curt and insensitive. I’m sincerely sorry.” He said he had meant to publicly thank the people who lost their jobs, “but failed to acknowledge the pain and uncertainty of being laid off. As a co-founder, I should have showed the people who helped build HubSpot more care and empathy.”
A layoff framed as strategy
HubSpot, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based maker of marketing and sales software, announced on Oct. 6 that it would eliminate roughly 660 positions, about 7% of its global workforce. As SSC reported when the cuts were announced, the layoffs came roughly a month after the company’s largest single-day stock drop in more than 12 years. The company expects $65 million to $75 million in related charges, according to a securities filing reported by Quartz.
In a letter to employees, CEO Yamini Rangan tied the cuts to the company’s shift toward delivering customer results with AI, Boston.com reported. HubSpot plans to organize its product teams around customer outcomes rather than its individual software “Hubs,” reduce layers of management and create clearer ownership across teams. “This is not driven by AI-related efficiencies,” Rangan wrote. “This is not simply a cost-cutting exercise.”
Affected employees will receive at least 20 weeks of base pay, plus one additional week for each year of service up to 30 weeks, along with health benefits, six months of career-transition services and the option to keep their company laptops. The cuts come as HubSpot’s stock has fallen about 45% this year, even as revenue grew about 20% in the second quarter.
Why the post landed badly
Shah’s message was brief and polite. It was the language that drew criticism. “Parted ways” made a layoff sound like a mutual decision. “Best wishes with the next chapter” sounded like a farewell to a colleague leaving for a new job, not to hundreds of people who hadn’t chosen to go.
Commenters on LinkedIn quickly said so. One suggested the company’s communications team must have been among the 7% let go. Another wrote that “a little remorse would go a long way.” Another said “parted ways” played down what was really a layoff, Fast Company reported. Not everyone objected. Some praised Shah for “acknowledging people during a difficult transition,” something many executives never do publicly at all.
Workplace experts have written about exactly this kind of language. “Softening the message doesn’t land as kindness,” organizational expert Karina Mangu-Ward wrote in Fast Company. Tammy Perkins, a former HR leader at Microsoft and Amazon, wrote in the same publication that what damages a company’s culture after layoffs is “indifference, silence, or meaningless lip service.”
Part of a larger pattern
HubSpot is one of several companies this month linking job cuts to a shift toward AI. FICO said it plans to cut 15% of its workforce as AI and competition reshape its business, and HSBC is cutting adviser jobs as AI moves closer to the customer. Amazon also cut hundreds of retail jobs during one of its biggest shopping events of the year.
HubSpot’s explanation is notable because it insists the cuts are about strategy, not about AI replacing workers. As we noted in our earlier coverage, those are two different routes to the same result: a job can disappear because software takes over the work, or because leadership decides the role no longer fits the business it wants to build. HubSpot is describing the second. For the people losing their jobs, that distinction may not matter much. What a company says about the cuts, and how its leaders say it, shapes how it is seen by the employees who leave, the employees who stay and the customers watching.
Why it matters
As more companies restructure around AI, layoff announcements are increasingly written in the language of transformation and growth. Shah’s apology is a reminder that the words leaders choose still matter. A post meant as gratitude became a story about tone because it described a painful event as something softer than it was. For many workers, the most respectful message is the most direct one: acknowledging that losing a job is a loss.
Sources: Fast Company, “HubSpot founder’s LinkedIn post thanking laid-off employees sparks criticism,” by Peter Saalfield, Oct. 8, 2026; Boston.com, Oct. 6, 2026; Quartz, Oct. 6, 2026; Dharmesh Shah on LinkedIn.