I am the Senior Director of Workforce Optimization at Cisco Systems and I want to share something I'm proud of.
In August we identified 5,500 roles that were misaligned with our AI infrastructure pivot. I use the word "misaligned" because HR approved it. The previous word was "redundant" but redundant tested poorly in the internal communications focus group. Misaligned tested well. It suggests the employee did something wrong. That was important to us.
The market gave us 4%. Honestly, I was disappointed. I told my team we need to think about this the way the Street thinks about it. The Street doesn't care that you removed 5,500 people. The Street cares that you removed 5,500 people *and* raised guidance in the same sentence. So that's what we did in Q3. We dissolved 4,000 additional roles and raised full-year guidance to $62.8 billion in the same paragraph of the same press release, and the stock surged 16% after hours. I was in the office watching. I keep a Bloomberg terminal on a second monitor for earnings nights. When the number moved I stood up at my desk. Nobody else was on the floor. It was 4:47 PM and the building was mostly empty, which I realize now is a thing I helped cause.
Revenue hit $15.84 billion. Each of the 4,000 dissolved roles generated approximately $70,000 in market cap. I track this ratio quarterly. I built the spreadsheet myself. It has a tab called "Per-Head Value Creation" and another tab called "Projection Scenarios" where I model what happens to the stock if we do 5,000 next quarter, or 6,000, or 8,000. I have not shared the 8,000 tab with anyone yet. I'm waiting for the right meeting.
Chuck said "focus, urgency, and discipline" on the earnings call. I helped draft that language. It took nine revisions. The first draft said "strategic headcount rationalization" and Legal flagged it because "rationalization" implies the prior headcount was irrational, which creates liability for two years of hiring decisions. So we workshopped alternatives. Someone suggested "realignment." Someone suggested "simplification." I suggested "focus" because focus is the only word in the English language that sounds like a strategy and a threat at the same time and no one can sue you for it.
Our internal tracking system is called VELOCITY. It stands for Value Enhancement Through Labor Optimization and Cost Intelligent Transformation, Year-over-year. It took a naming committee four weeks to finalize the acronym. During those four weeks we separated 1,200 people. I mention this only because the naming committee had six members and none of them found this uncomfortable. I found it efficient.
$5.3 billion in AI orders year-to-date. Raised to a $9 billion pipeline target. The CFO projects $6 billion in hyperscale AI revenue by FY2027. To get there the workforce needs to go from 86,200 to somewhere in the low 70s. I have a slide for this. The slide has two lines. One is headcount, going down. The other is AI order volume, going up. They cross somewhere around Q2 FY2026. I haven't titled the slide yet. My working title is "Alignment." I think that's clean.
Networking orders up 50%. Data-center switching up 40%. Restructuring charges up to $1 billion. I put these three numbers on a single slide for the investor deck. An analyst from Morgan Stanley emailed afterward and said it was "elegant." I printed the email. It's in a frame on my desk next to the Operational Excellence in Transition Award from our internal leadership council. The trophy is a glass cube with nothing inside it. I've been told this was an aesthetic choice by the designer. I think it's the most honest object in my office.
One of the 4,000 was a network engineer named David. Eleven years. He once drove from San Jose to Sacramento on a Saturday to physically restart a router that kept a hospital's ICU monitoring system online. I know this because it's in his performance file, which I reviewed as part of the Q3 separation list. His annual cost-to-company was $287,000. His departure improved our AI-readiness score by 0.003 points. I presented both numbers at my Thursday sync. Someone asked what the AI-readiness score was tracking toward. No one asked about the hospital.
The DOW hit 50,000 the same day we filed the restructuring notice with the SEC. I watched it on the terminal. I took a photo and sent it to my wife. She said "that's great." I wrote back explaining how our filing contributed to the broader rally and that the index was essentially agreeing with my Q3 plan. She didn't respond. I reread my message later and realized it was four paragraphs long. I think maybe I should have just said "good day at work."
We are entering Phase 3 planning for FY2026. VELOCITY has flagged another 6-8% of the workforce as what we internally call "the drag layer." These are roles that generate labor costs without contributing to the AI order pipeline. I have a preliminary separation model ready. The Slack channel for this work is called #
restructuring-wins#. It requires VP-level approval to join. We use a custom emoji for milestones. It's a green arrow pointing up. Someone on my team designed it. I approved it. I didn't think about it very hard at the time and I still don't.
I received a 22% performance bonus this quarter. The category on my review was "Demonstrates Focus." My skip-level told me it was the highest in the division. He shook my hand. I went back to my desk and saw that David's severance had been processed that morning. I noted the date. I did not note the coincidence. I don't think it was one. I think these are just two outputs of the same system, running correctly, at the same time.
I have a meeting Tuesday to review the Phase 3 list. The deck is formatted. The projections are loaded. I'm going to recommend we accelerate the timeline by one quarter. I think the Street will respond well. I think Chuck will say "focus." I think my phone will buzz.
I'm proud of the work we're doing here.
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USDH powered by Sky
The best stablecoin offers so much more than just a stable medium of exchange - it should also deliver highly efficient returns, generated by actively developing, building and growing the ecosystem it lives in.
By using Sky to power USDH, the Hyperliquid community will gain unbeatable advantages that no other stablecoin project can offer.
Sky, formerly known as MakerDAO, is the 4th largest stablecoin project in the world with more than 8 billion USDS in circulation, with 13 billion of highly diversified collateral. To see the high-level real-time overview of Sky and USDS, check out:
TL;DR of what Sky can offer Hyperliquid for USDH
* USDH will access 2.2 billion USDC instant liquidity for offchain redemption
* USDH will be natively multichain powered by LayerZero
* Sky will be able to deploy its 8b+ balance sheet into HyperLiquid
* Hyperliquid will receive 4.85% return on all USDH on Hyperliquid. This is a better rate than t-bills, backed by advanced risk management, and has potential to increase further.
* USDH will benefit from the 7+ year security track record and unbeatable Lindy of the Sky Protocol
* Sky can provide 25m in capital to create an independent Hyperliquid Star - a project that will autonomously grow DeFi on Hyperliquid, serving the needs of the Hyperliquid community, and will have tokens that are exclusively farmed on Hyperliquid, potentially bringing in billions in TVL
* To better understand Stars: Spark, which runs is the best example of a Star Token farm, and it currently has 1.2 billion TVL
* Sky can move its Buyback System on to Hyperliquid, using its more than 250m per year in profits to build SKY liquidity on Hyperliquid
* USDH will have deep transparency and verifiability of its collateral with
* USDH will benefit from the industry’s best risk management, built on models from the banking sector.
* USDH will be the only stablecoin in the world issued by a protocol with an official Credit Rating by S&P (alongside DAI and USDS).
* The Hyperliquid community will be able to customize USDH, e.g. to make it GENIUS Act compliant.
* Sky has immense research, development and builder capabilities and would prioritize the development and synergies possible with Hyperliquid as its top priority.
The team: Sky Frontier Foundation
The team behind this proposal that would work to implement the Sky Powered USDH is the recently established Sky Frontier Foundation. It contains top leadership and core developers from the Sky Ecosystem organized into a single entity for more efficient management and execution, and will directly work on, and prioritize, the implementation of USDH.
All the commitments and outcomes described in this proposal would be achieved by a combination of the SFF using its resources and capabilities, and also implemented through governance proposals to modify the decentralized Sky Protocol.
USDH implemented as Sky Stablecoin similar to DAI
USDH powered by Sky would be built as a token technically identical to DAI and USDS, the two major Stablecoin tokens that Sky currently governs, that together have a TVL of more than 8 billion and a security track record of more than 7 years. USDH would inherit all of this from the start.
USDH will have access to more than 2.2 billion in instant USDC liquidity, enabling large scale offchain redemptions at any time. Deep 1:1 liquidity with USDC would also make it easy and frictionless for users to shift to USDH-margined perpetuals contracts and USDH-quoted spot markets.
The 2.2 billion in instant USDC redemption liquidity is available through a system called the Peg Stability Module (PSM), and can be accessed by users on websites like and others. USDH will be natively integrated and work with the PSM alongside DAI and USDS everywhere.
USDH will be natively multichain, being able to bridge to and from any other blockchain via LayerZero. Having a secure, integrated bridge also means that Sky would be able to deploy its 8 billion+ collateral portfolio directly on to Hyperliquid with a low risk premium.
USDH will be able to natively convert to and from sUSDS, one of the largest yield-bearing assets in the market, giving its users instant, unlimited, permissionless access to the Sky Savings Rate (Currently at 4.75%)
Earning a return on USDH for the HyperLiquid Community
The HyperLiquid Community would earn the highest possible rate on all the USDH on Hyperliquid - right now this is 4.85%, which is currently significantly above the T-Bill rate, but with very high diversification and high quality risk management (see security and risk management below).
The return may increase further as Sky capabilities and efficiency increase over time.
The entirety of the 4.85% earned by all of the USDH on Hyperliquid will be used for HYPE buybacks for the assistance fund.
Growing HyperLiquid TVL and bootstrapping DeFi innovation with a 25m HyperLiquid Genesis Star
Sky’s infrastructure can provide uniquely valuable support to the Hyperliquid community via the Sky Stars.
The best examples are Spark and Grove, autonomous projects that allocate Sky collateral with a combined allocation of 6 billion dollars.
The Sky Powered USDH stablecoin will be accompanied by a Hyperliquid Star that can drive huge amounts of growth and innovation, as well as potentially attract billions in TVL by farming out its Star Tokens (The Spark SPK farm currently has a TVL of 1.2 billion
Sky can commit to capitalize the Hyperliquid Genesis Star with 25 million in USDH, and exclusively farm it out on the Hyperliquid Blockchain. The ecosystem of Star Incubators would work with leaders from the Hyperliquid community to assemble a highly capable founding team that would work on the Hyperliquid Star to bootstrap a massive, thriving DeFi ecosystem on Hyperliquid, in the same way Spark has done it for Sky.
Buyback engine native on Hyperliquid
Sky generates 250m in profits per year, and currently uses 36m per year for SKY token buybacks. This number is planned to increase to 150m per year, and will grow even more as Sky profits increase over time. Currently, this buyback system uses Uniswap.
As a part of the Sky Powered USDH proposal, Sky can move its native Buyback System to Hyperliquid, increasing liquidity and use cases, and setting the example that Hyperliquid is the standard solution for Protocol token buybacks that all other protocols should use.
Security and Risk Management
Sky has a security track record of more than 7 years of continuous operation without losses for stablecoin holders, building a Lindy effect through multiple crypto cycles and bear markets, making it by far the safest and most proven decentralized stablecoin. These characteristics will be fully inherited by USDH.
Add to the that, the fact that Sky is the only stablecoin project in the world to have an official credit rating from S&P, which gave it a B- on August 7
While a B- rating is a middle rating, which reflects S&Ps lack of familiarity with Crypto and DeFi, being able to get any rating at all is a massive breakthrough because it shows that S&P are able to access all of the data they need to produce a holistic credit assessment they can stand behind, so it signals a much lower chance of tail risks hidden inside the protocol, which is usually the big issue with DeFi and Stablecoins.
The Sky Risk Management Framework that controls the diversification of the collateral portfolio that backs USDS, DAI and USDH, is derived from Basel III, the framework used to control risk in banks. For RWA collateral such as CLOs or T-bills, Basel III is used directly, while for DeFi collateral such as allocations into lending markets, an extension of Basel III that captures its fundamental approach but applies it to DeFi, is used.
The amount of Junior Capital protecting each positions exposure can be verified in real time on
Autonomy and customization of USDH
Sky is a decentralized protocol and ecosystem that gives partners unparalleled levels of autonomy and ability to customize the Sky infrastructure they use. Unlike monolithic systems, Sky will simply provide Hyperliquid with the infrastructure and the tools to pursue the strategy the community prefers, and that uniquely fits the special conditions of Hyperliquid.
In the longer term, as the Sky Agent Framework that powers Sky Infrastructure matures, the USDH stablecoin will be put under the control of a dedicated Sky Generator Agent, turning USDH into an independent Sky Generated Asset. This will also happen to USDS, and means that USDH will gain the full first-class citizen features of the entire Sky Protocol alongside USDS and other Sky Stablecoins. It will be possible for the Hyperliquid community to customize USDH with its own risk management framework and collateral portfolio, separate from USDS.
This gives the Hyperliquid community a lot of options: for instance USDH can be made compatible as a GENIUS Act compliant stablecoin, or it can pursue a higher risk approach and exclusively be backed by Hyperliquid perp positions, or any other strategy the community prefers.
At its core, Sky is built to support partners like Hyperliquid using a Sky-powered system like USDH to grow and succeed. This means a focus on autonomy and reliability, with the core of Sky having very little governance and strategic direction beyond protecting, developing, scaling and de-risking the core Sky infrastructure that all other ecosystem participants share and rely on.
This means that the priorities of Sky can never end up conflicting with the priorities of Hyperliquid, making it a safe bet as a long term partner.
Commitment to build in the Hyperliquid Ecosystem regardless of vote outcome
The similarity of Sky and Hyperliquid in focusing on real profits, building useful decentralized infrastructure, means there is a natural alignment between Sky and Hyperliquid
Regardless of how the USDH ticker vote turns out, Sky is committed to expand and work with Hyperliquid to explore all the synergies of the two projects. Many of the concepts described above were already under development, and the outcome of this proposal would speed them up and increase their scale, but fundamentally it is clear that both Sky and Hyperliquid will deeply benefit from close integration in the long run no matter what.
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