Here was the news with VRChat in June 2024:
In brutal news for VRChat employees, 30% were laid off late yesterday -- though fortunately, with generous severance packages. In a refreshingly honest email to staff, co-founder/CEO Graham Gaylor puts the blame on himself, saying he over-hired while also taking too long to add management, making it difficult for the startup to reach profitability before they run out of funding...
With these layoffs, VRChat will now have the breathing room to achieve profitability. As I mentioned to one staffer last night, this reminds me of the time early on when Linden Lab also laid off 30% of its staff -- and then soon saw Second Life take off like a rocket.
In all honesty, I wrote that last sentence hoping it wasn't just over-optimistic pro-metaverse spin.
But now in June 2025, here's the news from Chandra Janakiraman, the Meta / Zynga veteran who took on the Chief Product Officer role for the company shortly before the layoffs:
We are hiring across a range of functions & positions. It's an exciting time to join us, as we write the next chapter of immersive social connection at scale!
Here's the current job listings, with 10 roles on display, including Avatar Marketplace Content Reviewer, to help grow that new feature which also went live this month, and Director of Product, New Audiences:
The Director of Product, New Audiences role is a highly strategic Senior IC role on the product management team at VRChat. This person will lead our efforts to drive user acquisition and early stage retention, and play a pivotal role in building the experiences that will help us reach the next 10 million users.
Emphasis mine, because this description again suggests that VRChat is still at around 10 million MAU, as it was last year. In any case, this role is on top of a recent company partnership with Sawhorse Productions, a leading immersive marketing agency that's done a number of brand activations in metaverse platforms Roblox and Fortnite.
Check the job listings here. Someone at the company tells me that, yes, being a current VRChat user is a definite plus, as long as all the other job requirement boxes are checked. The company does indeed hire from the creator community:
VRChat first hired Merlin to do contract work to support UdonSharp last year, a good thing to benefit the thousands of community creators who already rely on his compiler -- not to mention financially supporting Merlin himself, who was unemployed at the time.
“I was living off savings from my prior job and working towards breaking even on living costs for rent/food/etc with Patreon,” he says.
Merlin later saw a need to improve the Udon SDK on a broader level -- but only if he were working for the company full-time. So he applied, and joined the team:
“Overall it doesn't feel very different in my case," Merlin says about corporate life at VRChat Inc., "since I'd had relatively close interaction with VRChat as a community developer for a while beforehand and I knew a number of the people I am now working with from being friends with them in VRChat.”
Like the rest of the VRChat team, he only works remotely: “We often have team meetings in VRChat which is cool.”
Also known as the VCs are looking elsewhere. Never ever work for a USian company :)
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Tuesday, June 24, 2025 at 03:53 PM