Education startup GoStudent held a massive staff party with dancing dwarves, fire dancers, and a motocross show less than two weeks before the first of a series of layoffs that affected about a quarter of its workforce, a leaked video obtained by Business Insider shows.
The $3 billion-valued startup, founded in Austria in 2016, has developed a one-to-one tutoring platform for students of all ages and levels that covers over 30 subjects.
GoStudent is backed by some of the world’s biggest investors, including SoftBank, New York-based asset manager Coatue, and China’s Tencent. The startup employed over 2,000 people at its peak, a figure that shrunk to 1,500, according to public documents updated in December 2022.
GoStudent, like other education startups, benefited from a low-interest-rate environment and pandemic lockdowns that forced students to stay at home and on their devices. In early 2022, the startup raised $340 million and had scaled to 24 markets.
But falling interest rates, the Russia-Ukraine war, and an end to pandemic-era habits spooked investors through 2022, forcing startups to slash spending and push towards financial sustainability. That year, tech firms cut almost 165,000 jobs, per Layoffs.fyi.
The company hosted a “festival” on June 17, 2022, where staffers had to sign a mandatory code of conduct that forbade them from taking photos or doing drugs, BI previously reported. Now, leaked footage shows the extent of the blowout, which was attended by up to 2,000 people at Viennese venue Metastadt.
The video, which runs over two minutes in length, was provided by a former employee whose identity is known to BI. It appears to have been created and edited on behalf of GoStudent with the company’s logo appearing at the end, though it remains unclear why a video of the event was created.
A GoStudent spokesperson said: “Although we are still a young company, our business is constantly evolving and important lessons are learned year-on-year. The last 18 months have seen us make many positive changes in how we operate both internally and externally.”
The festival was part of the company’s spending on team-building activities, which it said was designed to reward the hard work of its employees over the previous year. The startup believed bringing its employees together after being kept apart during the COVID-19 pandemic was strategically important to boost motivation.
On June 28, 2022, 11 days after the festival, GoStudent closed its Swedish office and withdrew from the market, resulting in the loss of 21 jobs. The company said this decision was unrelated to the party and that its associated costs had already been incurred in advance of the emergence of a more challenging economy.
Over the following six months, GoStudent pulled out of nine markets and conducted a series of layoffs that impacted around quarter of its workforce.
The video was shared internally with staffers, two different former employees who were there at the time said.
GoStudent organized and paid for the party, per BI’s previous reporting. Staffers from as far away as Brazil were flown in and lodged near the venue, four ex-employees who attended the festival told BI, with the company shouldering all expenses from accommodation to flights and local transport.
BI has refrained from publishing the video in full to protect the identity of its attendees.
The event was stocked with free food and drinks, per previous reports. A bevy of activities were also on offer, including body painting and tattoo stations.
The leaked video shows dancing dwarves, algebra written on a person’s arms in fluorescent paint, close-ups of drinks, fire dancers, and a motocross show, where two motorcycle riders jumped between ramps and flipped upside down in the air. Employees, following the white dress code suggested by GoStudent, are shown cheering at the stunts.
The video also shows DJs playing to a crowd, with the DJ’s name and the GoStudent logo displayed in the background at different points. A mixture of music was played but it was mainly dance, drum and bass, ex-staffers previously told BI.
“They had dwarves dancing on the stage which I found very distasteful,” one former staffer added.
When Ohswald was conducting GoStudent’s second round of cuts in December, he said the economic environment had “significantly worsened” since its first round in September.
“We had our first changes in September of this year while we revised our targets for 2023,” he told staff during an all-hands meeting at the time. “We truly believed at that point in time that we had done enough, given the information we had at the time.”
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