2025 IU POP-UP STORE [Found at Eight] Official MD Notice 📍 Operating Period : September 10 (Wed) – September 21 (Sun), 2025 (※ Closed on September 15 (Mon)) 📍 Venue : THE HYUNDAI SEOUL 5F, EPIC SEOUL 🔗 🔗 #아이유# #IU# #IU_POPUP# #Found_at_Eight#

2025 IU POP-UP STORE [Found at Eight] Official MD Notice 📍 Operating Period : September 10 (Wed) – September 21 (Sun), 2025 (※ Closed on September 15 (Mon)) 📍 Venue : THE HYUNDAI SEOUL 5F, EPIC SEOUL 🔗 🔗 #아이유# #IU# #IU_POPUP# #Found_at_Eight#

I am the Senior Vice President of Workforce Architecture at Cloudflare and I need to tell you about the best decision this company has ever made. We posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue. 34% year-over-year growth. Record net retention. The strongest quarter since IPO. And then we fired 1,100 people. Not because of the quarter. During the quarter. I need you to understand the sequence because the sequence is the whole point. My team built the model that made this possible. We call it CIRRUS: "Capacity-Indexed Reduction and Reallocation for Upside Scaling". CIRRUS took our revenue trajectory, our margin targets, and our board's stated appetite for what they called "structural boldness," and it determined that the optimal time to execute a 20% headcount reduction is at the exact moment of peak financial performance. Not during a downturn. Not during a miss. During a beat. The logic is simple. When revenue is surging, the market reads a cost reduction as discipline. When revenue is falling, the market reads the same reduction as panic. Same action. Same 1,100 people. Completely different stock reaction. CIRRUS identified a seven-day window where the earnings momentum and the layoff announcement would compound rather than cancel. I found the math beautiful. I still do. We deactivated 1,100 badges between 9:00 and 9:04 AM Pacific on a Monday. People Analytics determined this was the four-minute window of lowest Slack activity. We called it a "clean cutover." Someone in Infrastructure suggested "zero-downtime deprecation" but Legal thought it sounded too much like a product feature. I thought it sounded exactly like a product feature, which is why I liked it. But I deferred to Legal. I always defer to Legal. That is one of the things that makes me good at this job. The people we cut were not underperformers. I want to be very clear about that because clarity is a Cloudflare value. Sixty-two percent had received exceeds-expectations in their most recent review cycle. Fourteen had been promoted in Q3. One engineer in our Austin office — I'll call him Marcus, though that is not his name and the reason I'm not using his name is not that I've forgotten it — had shipped the caching optimization that directly contributed to $14 million in new enterprise contracts. His manager nominated him for the Raygun Award, which is our internal recognition for outsized impact, six days before I added him to the CIRRUS list. He won the award on Wednesday. His access was revoked the following Monday. The ceremony and the termination were planned by different teams in the same building and neither team knew about the other. I don't think this is ironic. I think this is how large organizations work. The left hand builds. The right hand optimizes. Both hands are attached to the same body and the body is performing well. We let Marcus keep the trophy. It's a small acrylic prism etched with a lightning bolt. It costs us about eleven dollars. His annual cost-to-company was $312,000. CIRRUS selected the 1,100 based on three variables. I'm going to share them because I believe in the methodology. First: salary band. Employees in bands 6 through 8 offered the highest savings-to-replacement-risk ratio. Second: visa dependency. Employees on sponsored visas have a 60-day window to find new employment or begin departure proceedings. This creates what CIRRUS categorizes as "low-friction separation" — the compliance timeline is externally enforced, which reduces our administrative burden. I presented this variable to HR and they requested I rename it from "visa dependency" to "mobility factor" in all future documentation. I agreed. The math didn't change. Third: managerial tenure. Employees whose direct manager had been at the company less than eighteen months were 73% less likely to generate a negative Glassdoor review, because the manager-employee bond hadn't fully formed. CIRRUS weighted this at 15% of the selection score. We call it the "attachment coefficient." We told the market the layoffs were an AI workforce pivot. We said artificial intelligence was making certain roles redundant. We said we were reallocating resources toward our AI gateway products. This was a communications strategy. Not a workforce strategy. The AI framing was my team's recommendation and I'm proud of it because it worked. Two analysts upgraded us the same week. The stock moved 8% in five sessions. The entire AI narrative was four paragraphs in a press release that took my comms partner and me an afternoon to write. Four paragraphs. 1,100 people. 8%. I don't know what the per-paragraph return on that is but I think about it sometimes. The actual AI initiative employs thirty-seven people. We cut 1,100 to fund 37. The ratio is not in any of our public materials. There is a Slack channel called #bright-futures# that our Head of People Experience created for the remaining employees. It posts an automated message every morning at 8:45 AM: "You are the ones we chose to keep." The message includes a rotating motivational quote. Last Tuesday it was a Winston Churchill quote about perseverance. The channel has a custom emoji called :survivor: that the Culture team designed. It's a small cartoon phoenix. Nine hundred people have used it unironically. I find this genuinely moving. I think it shows resilience. My wife says it shows something else but she works in education and I think the frameworks are different. The severance was calculated using a model we licensed from the same consulting firm that built our customer pricing tiers. Median payout: eleven weeks. We benchmarked against industry and landed at the 50th percentile exactly, which our CHRO described as "fair by design." The 1,100 will burn through their severance while our stock price digests a 20% cost reduction applied to a revenue base that was already growing 34%. By the time the last check clears, the savings will have funded the first full quarter of the AI initiative. The one with thirty-seven people. My performance review is next month. I've been told informally that I'm on the COO track. The criteria include "demonstrated ability to execute at scale with minimal organizational disruption." The 1,100 people are the execution. The stock price is the scale. The four-minute badge window is the minimal disruption. I meet all three criteria. I designed all three criteria. Not the review criteria. The outcomes. I keep the CIRRUS model on my laptop in a folder called "Workforce Planning FY26." It sits next to a subfolder called "Offsite Photos — Maui" from the leadership retreat we took in January, where we set the annual targets that the 1,100 people spent four months hitting before we terminated them for hitting them. Marcus's desk in Austin has been reassigned. I don't know to whom. The acrylic prism is probably in a box somewhere. Or maybe whoever cleaned out the desk kept it. It catches the light nicely. I noticed that once, when I visited the Austin office to present the CIRRUS methodology to the regional leadership team. They gave me a standing ovation. The prism was on a desk near the back of the room, refracting a small rainbow onto the wall behind me. I didn't mention it. I stayed on my slides. I'm proud of the work we've done here. I think when people look back at this quarter, they'll see it as the moment Cloudflare became a different kind of company. I think they'll be right. I think the 1,100 people would agree, if you explained the math to them carefully enough.

Most projects skip modelling because they think it is about predicting price. It is not. Modelling is about stress-testing decisions before they cost you. Whether your token is at 4 dollars or 7 dollars in month three does not matter; whether changing your staking APY from 6% to 12% kills your collateral ratio absolutely does. Time Wonderland's lambo counter assumed everyone would keep staking forever (3,3). One stochastic model would have shown the death spiral when even a small fraction sold; instead, the team found out live, on a bridge they could not unbuild. Models cost five figures. The mistakes they catch usually cost seven or eight. Read the full article:

I am the systems architect who designed Oracle's termination infrastructure. We designed the termination sequence to execute in under four seconds. VPN first. Then Slack. Then email. Then badge. The order matters. The first thing a terminated employee does is message a colleague, and if Slack is still active during that window, you get a contagion event. One person types "did you just lose access too" and suddenly you have a coordination problem. Slack dies at T-plus-0.6 seconds. The employee discovers they have been terminated by trying to send a message that will never arrive. We found this was more efficient than the email. The body knows before the mind does. The email arrives at T-plus-3.8 seconds. By then, they have already tried Slack. Tried VPN. Tried their badge on the parking garage reader. The email is not information. The email is confirmation of what the body already knows. The sequence is body, then mind. I designed for that. March 31. Twenty to thirty thousand employees. One email template. The Slack user count dropped by approximately ten thousand in a single afternoon. I watched the number. I designed the system that generates the number. The number worked. The stock rose six percent. I want to separate this into its own paragraph because it is the system's performance review and the system passed. Larry Ellison owns forty-two-point-nine percent of Oracle. On March 31, the day thirty thousand people received an email at T-plus-3.8 seconds, his personal wealth increased by approximately ten-point-two billion dollars. His base salary is one dollar. The dollar is not where the money is. The money is in the thirty thousand emails. I designed the system that sent the emails. The stock is the system's grade. The severance structure. Four weeks' base pay for the first year of service. One additional week per year after that. Capped at twenty-six weeks. One month of COBRA. No RSU acceleration. That last line needs its own paragraph because it is where the money is. RSUs are restricted stock units. They are compensation you have earned but not yet received. They vest on a schedule. If you are terminated before the vest date, they do not reduce. They do not prorate. They vanish. The word in the plan document is "forfeit." The word means: the company keeps what it promised you. One employee had approximately one million dollars in unvested RSUs. He had worked at Oracle for eleven years. His vest date was four months away. RSUs represented seventy percent of his total compensation. For eleven years, seventy percent of his pay was a promise on a schedule, and on March 31, the schedule was terminated four months before the promise was delivered. He could see the money from where he stood. We moved the floor. I did not design the RSU plan. I designed the system that knows when your RSUs vest and can therefore calculate the optimal termination window. The system does not call it that. The system calls it "workforce planning." The math is the same. He sent a personal email to his vice president. He described eleven years. Projects he had built. Systems that are still running. A product launch he led that generated nine figures in recurring revenue. He asked for a four-month courtesy extension on his vest schedule. Four months. After eleven years. I forwarded his email to the archive folder. The archive folder is part of the architecture. I built it in February. It is where requests go after the system has already answered them. The system answered his request on March 31 at the same T-plus-3.8 seconds as everyone else's. His eleven years did not add processing time. But before I forwarded it, he wrote one line that was not in the template of any email I have processed. He wrote: "I built nine of your systems and they are still in production." I checked. He was correct. Nine systems. Three of them are in the termination architecture. I used his infrastructure to remove him. The system does not track irony. I do not either. I am noting it for the record. There was another. Not eleven years. Decades. He called himself Uncle Larry's biggest fan. He was near the end of his career. No children. Oracle was his biography. His response to the T-plus-3.8 email was four words. "Thank you. Go fuck yourself." I archived that one too. It processes the same as every other. Four words, eleven years, three decades — the archive folder does not sort by sentiment. That is a design feature. Sentiment is not a variable I built for. The WARN Act. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires sixty days' advance notice for mass layoffs affecting a hundred or more employees at a single site. Sixty days. That is the law. The law has an exemption for employees classified as remote workers. Remote workers do not have a "site." Therefore they cannot be laid off from a site. Therefore they do not require sixty days' notice. Therefore, if you classify everyone as remote, the WARN Act does not apply. We classified them as remote. Some of them did not know. They worked hybrid schedules. They came to the office three days a week. They badged in at the lobby. They sat at assigned desks. They attended all-hands meetings in the cafeteria. They had a coffee mug in the kitchen with their name on it. But the database said remote. And the database was not describing where they worked. The database was describing how we planned to remove them. The classification was the first step of the termination. They just didn't know it yet. I want to be precise about this. A loophole is an accident in the law that someone discovers. This was a design decision in the database that someone engineered. I engineered it. I looked at the WARN Act. I looked at our classification system. I made them compatible. That is not exploitation. That is architecture. No attorney general has challenged the classification. The legal theory is untested. It is untested because it is working. You do not test what works. You do not audit what passes. You do not investigate what generates a six-percent stock increase. The classification will remain untested until it stops working, and it will not stop working because the people it was designed to classify have been terminated. Oracle is investing fifty billion dollars in AI infrastructure. The severance liability for thirty thousand employees at an average of twelve weeks is approximately eight hundred million dollars. Fifty billion to build the infrastructure. Eight hundred million to remove the people. The infrastructure costs sixty-two times more than the people. That is not a comparison. That is a valuation. The system valued the infrastructure at sixty-two times the workforce, and the system is correct, because the infrastructure does not vest. The infrastructure does not send personal emails to vice presidents. The infrastructure does not organize on Google Docs. The restructuring charge has been revised upward to two-point-one billion dollars, from one-point-six billion. The revision is not a failure. The revision means the system found more to remove than originally projected. The system exceeded its own forecast. In product, we call that outperformance. Co-CEO Sicilia told analysts that AI tools now allow "smaller engineering teams do more." I want to be precise about what this sentence means. The engineering teams built the AI tools. The AI tools learned from what the engineering teams built. Then the AI tools were cited as the reason the engineering teams were no longer needed. The teams built the tools. The tools replaced the teams. That is not a layoff. That is a harvest. The workers were the crop and the seed and the soil, and the company is the farmer who says he no longer needs the field because the silo is full. The MySQL team lost approximately seventy developers. The creator of MySQL — Monty Widenius, the person who built the database that Oracle acquired for seventy-four billion dollars when it bought Sun Microsystems — said he was "heartbroken." I did not design the MySQL termination. I designed the system that executed it. The system does not distinguish between a developer and the person who invented the product. The system sees headcount. Headcount is headcount. That is why I built it that way. An Ohio pension fund has filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Oracle's eighteen billion dollars in bond offerings contained "false and misleading" statements about the company's financial condition. The pension fund represents carpenters. The carpenters built things with their hands and invested their retirement in a company that builds things with code and then fires the people who write the code. I did not design the bond offering. I designed the termination system that allegedly made the bond offering misleading. The carpenters' retirement is not in my architecture. It is adjacent to it. Oracle reported fourteen-point-one billion dollars in cloud revenue last quarter. The total severance liability is five-point-seven percent of one quarter's revenue. We will recover it by June. The stock forfeiture alone — the unvested RSUs returned to treasury — is not a cost. It is a credit. The terminations improved the balance sheet on the day they occurred. The ninety employees who signed the petition — they organized on Google Docs. Not Oracle Cloud. Not Oracle Collaboration Suite. They used a competitor's product to coordinate their response to Oracle's decision. I noticed. It does not affect the severance calculation. It affects me. They chose Google. I designed a system. The system classified them before it terminated them. The system calculated their severance before it notified them. The system denied their petition before it read their petition. The system declined to comment before it was asked. The system works. I designed it. The next version will design itself.

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.