A cofounder of NPM, a startup that 11 million developers rely on, has resigned in the wake of a period of employee unrest

Rosalie Chan

Jul 18, 2019, 23:03 IST

A cofounder of NPM, a startup that 11 million developers rely on, has resigned in the wake of a period of employee unrest

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Laurie Voss, chief data officer and co-founder of npm

Co-founder Laurie Voss has resigned from the developer startup NPM, he announced Thursday.
Voss served as the chief data officer, and most recently represented NPM at two developer conferences.
In his blog post, Voss said that NPM's paid products have "tens of thousands of happy users," and that the revenue from those businesses are enough to finance the company's "core operations."
NPM co-founder Isaac Schlueter, who was the CEO until he was replaced by Bryan Bogensberger, remains as the company's chief product officer.
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Laurie Voss, co-founder of NPM, a startup that provides crucial tools to 11 million developers, has resigned from the company, he announced Thursday.

NPM started as an open source project that provides free JavaScript tools that are used to run web applications. Voss and his co-founders built a business around it to support these tools.

Voss started as the founding CTO of the company, and then became COO. Starting in January, he became the Chief Data Officer. According to a blog post on the company website, he decided to leave in early May, and his last full-time day was July 1.

"There are hundreds of thousands of companies large and small whose efficiency and security can be improved by using npm Orgs and Enterprise, and that mission is barely begun. While I am parting ways with npm, I look forward to seeing my friends and colleagues continue to grow and change the JavaScript ecosystem for the better," Voss wrote in a blog post.

In the blog post, he says that one of his goals with the company since its founding in 2014 was to keep its core NPM Registry product functioning indefinitely - and that he felt this goal had been achieved.

"Our paid products, npm Orgs and npm Enterprise, have tens of thousands of happy users and the revenue from those sustains our core operations," Voss wrote.

Prior to his resignation, Voss had represented NPM at the developer conferences JSConf.Asia in Singapore and Web Directions in Melbourne, Australia. Sources familiar with the matter tell Business Insider that Voss had already informed NPM's board of his decision to depart before attending these conferences.

NPM has faced its share of unrest in the past few months. In March, the Register first reported on the backlash against NPM management after it was criticized for the layoff of five employees.

It was later reported that three of those employees were involved in unionization efforts at the company, and that they had filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board after they were dismissed. In late June, NPM settled with those employees.

In May, 17 NPM employees circulated an internal letter demanding better working conditions due to a lack of transparency into the company's financial health, the lack of cost-of-living raises, and related issues. The letter also indicated that there has been a 20% reduction in staff following the layoff of those 5 employees.

"In the past month, actions and inactions by current management have led to a 20% decline in npm staff. This trend shows no sign of slowing following a continued lack of transparency into the financial health of the company, the deletion of the employee handbook, the lack of cost-of-living raises, and the lack of accountability in the treatment of remaining staff," the letter said.

Meanwhile, in May, GitHub announced it launched a rival product.

Co-founder Isaac Schlueter, who was the CEO until he was replaced by Bryan Bogensberger, is still at NPM as the chief product officer. The other co-founder, Rod Boothby, left NPM in 2016.

Business Insider has reached out to NPM for comment.

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