Tom Brady’s NFT Company Autograph has laid off dozens of people
- Tom Brady co-founded Autograph at the height of the NFT sports boom.
- Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried joined the board of the company last year.
- Insider has learned that the company has laid off dozens of employees and cut ties with Bankman-Fried.
Autograph, the busy NFT platform founded by NFL star Tom Brady, has laid off dozens of employees after cutting ties with former board member Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, Insider has learned.
The layoffs are mostly centered in marketing, HR and creative departments, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. Autograph employs 124 people, according to Linkedin data.
“Like other technology companies, we are not immune to the challenges in the market and had to implement a small reduction in the workforce,” the company wrote in a statement, confirming the layoffs. “We look forward to continuing to build new Web3 fan experiences and products for years to come.”
Brady launched Autograph last year at the height of the NFT sports boom, along with founder Richard Rosenblatt and his son Dillon Rosenblatt, who is the company’s CEO.
A modern, blockchain-enabled version of trading cards that have been around for more than a century, Autograph enables users to purchase non-fungible tokens featuring sports stars such as Tiger Woods, Naomi Osaka, Derek Jeter and Wayne Gretzky.
Autograph, which is based in Los Angeles, closed a $170 million Series B funding round earlier this year led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins with participation from former top Andreessen crypto partner Katie Haun, which earlier this year raised a fund of 1 .5 billion dollars.
Haun, Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, joined a star-studded board that already included Brady. Other board members include Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Apple, and Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, the recording artist known as the Weeknd.
Bankman-Fried joined the board last year several months after Brady and his then-wife, Gisele Bundchen, invested in FTX.
“Autograph is at the forefront of the digital collectibles space, and I look forward to helping them expand their capabilities,” Bankman-Fried said at the time. “As a pioneer in the space, Autograph has unlimited potential when bringing icons and crypto together.”
It is not clear when Bankman-Fried left the board, but his name is no longer listed on Autograph’s website.
By almost any measure, the NFT market has been hit hard since the start of the year amid the broader decline in equities and cryptocurrency. Venture capital funding for Web3 startups in the third quarter of 2022 fell by almost half from the previous quarter, to $3.3 billion from $6 billion, according to Crunchbase. Many crypto companies, including Coinbase, Gemini and OpenSea, have collectively lost more than 1,000 jobs through layoffs.
