New Relic CEO scolds employees in internal memo: ‘We are a company with an

Software company New Relic, one of Portland’s largest technology employers, is lagging behind rivals and needs more from its employees to catch up, the company’s CEO warned his staff in an all-company memo last month.

The blunt letter exhorts employees to work harder and rejects their calls for the company to take a more active role in the nation’s resurgent civil rights movement.

“We are a company with an urgent need to get back on track,” CEO Lew Cirne wrote in a June 19 memo to all employees.

The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained a copy of the memo, which describes a company at a critical juncture after a year of disappointing financial results. Cirne writes that New Relic is in dire need of a turnaround and he puts the onus on employees to deliver.

“Our growth rate is far behind that of our competitors, and also behind the growth rates of the cloud providers,” Cirne wrote. “History has not been kind to technology companies who do not continue to grow. Technology companies either grow or they die. There is no middle option.”

New Relic’s headquarters are in San Francisco, where Cirne works, but it employs more than 600 in Portland on the upper floors of the U.S. Bancorp Tower (“Big Pink”) downtown.

New Relic’s software enables organizations to track activity on their own websites to monitor the performance of their online products and services. Cirne, 50, started the company in 2008 – “New Relic” is an anagram of his name, “Lew Cirne.” He previously worked as an engineer at Apple and Hummingbird and founded Wily Technology, which sold to CA Technologies in 2006 for $375 million.

A decade ago, New Relic made the unusual decision to put its software engineering team in Oregon at a time when old-line computer hardware still dominated the state’s technology sector. The office grew quickly and played a key role in the transition of Oregon tech to contemporary software and web services.

New Relic raised $114 million in its 2014 initial public offering. The company reported sales of nearly $600 million last year and a loss of $91 million.

New Relic’s growth has slowed considerably in recent years, though, and it forecasts sales will increase just 13% in the current quarter compared to the same period a year ago. The stock has lost about a quarter of its value in the past year.

Cirne’s letter begins by acknowledging the strains employees face during the pandemic and the horrors conveyed through new awareness of systemic racism.

“As if that weren’t enough, things are also particularly difficult for our business at New Relic,” Cirne wrote. He quotes two stock analysts who have sell ratings on the company, one of whom groups New Relic among industry “laggards.”

“Reading reports like these feels like a punch in the gut,” Cirne wrote. “But it also inspires me – and hopefully all of you – to prove these…