To the Compass Mining community:

Today, we have made the difficult decision to reduce the size of the Compass team by 15% and to implement significant compensation and spend reductions across the rest of the business. While painful, these changes will enable Compass to stay agile and well-positioned in this evolving market, which has challenged many of our industry peers. Of all the decisions we have had to make as new CEOs, this will be by far the hardest, and we take full responsibility for all of the changes that have been, and will be made, under our leadership.

Compass started with a simple idea–that everyone should be able to mine bitcoin–and we’ve come a long way to that end. From our humble beginnings in January 2021 to today, we have sold over half a billion dollars of mining equipment with over 30,000 machines operating on behalf of thousands of customers. We are incredibly proud of this growth, and could not have accomplished this without our customers, our amazing team and our passionate community and investors.

However, like many companies, we grew too quickly. When we launched, we were amazed by the level of demand for our services, and as a result, we tried to address the operational, financial, and technology bottlenecks faced by all growing companies by hiring more people. While we have so many appreciative customers with our service, it is not nearly where it needs to be. As we pursued ambitious scaling and growth goals, we failed to deliver the level of trust and service that made us successful in the first place. Given recent market downturn and anticipated future market conditions, we had to take a hard look at our spend and recalibrate for the future of the business.

Over the last few weeks, it has become very clear that we needed to make substantial changes to help Compass achieve its mission. We made significant leadership changes last week to reorient the company. We publicly addressed an issue with a service provider to improve transparency and stop unfounded rumors about the health of our business. We are committed to implementing the changes we think are necessary now and in the future, and to doing so swiftly and decisively.

The immediate changes we are making are as follows:

We have let go of 15% of our team and reduced compensation for executives.

Our Compass employees are incredibly talented, passionate, and experienced, having built a high growth Bitcoin mining business booking hundreds of millions of dollars in sales per year in less than 18 months. We realize that finding a new role in this market will be challenging, and we will provide financial and non-financial assistance to help make this unexpected transition as seamless as possible. The changes we need to make don’t only impact our departing team members. Our senior employees and executive team have taken significant pay cuts of up to 50% as part of this process.

We will be  re-evaluating our marketing approach.

We will spend more time diligencing content providers, and partner with those with high integrity, that care about companies they accept dollars from. The most important go-forward factor is to deliver exceptional service and value to our customers.

As the leaders of this business, to our departing employees–we thank you for your dedication and commitment to Compass and our customers, and apologize for our role in creating this challenging situation. We will do all we can to support you in this transition, and we recognize even that is not enough.

To our team, we know this is a difficult time for all of us, and we thank you for being willing to forego some short term benefits to set Compass up for long term success. We have been blown away by your dedication to our business, and believe there is nothing this team cannot accomplish with direction, focus, and discipline. We know there is fear, uncertainty, and doubt about our future, but know this decision and others we will share in the coming weeks and months are all focused on making Compass the best solution for bitcoin mining equipment and hosting–from the retail HODLer to the largest institution.

Best,

Thomas Heller and Paul Gosker, co-founders and interim CEOs