Pure Storage Number of Employees

This post is an excerpt from Part 1 of my deep dive on Pure Storage. This post will just discuss the number of Pure Storage employees. You can find way more details on Pure Storage in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my deep dive.

To gather the detailed number of employees at Pure Storage, I had to pour through Pure Storage’s 10Q’s, 10K’s, LinkedIn data, job postings that liberally posted sales employee headcount, and using a small portion of my brain to synthesize all this data.  I’m simplifying this but it’s 99% boring to double click into the details of how I came up with my model.  Here is the Pure Storage number of employees, by department:

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My confidence is significantly higher on all of the Q4 headcount numbers based on the data I had (Pure Storage gives pretty good details in their 10K) but I’m still fairly confident in all of the headcount numbers, as you will see based on comparisons to LinkedIn data in a little bit.

Can’t see the image above? Click here

As you can see, my model isn’t perfectly aligning to quarterly changes in headcount but the net is pretty spot on.  The black line represents total headcount changes as reported in Pure’s own 10Q’s. The breakdown in the bar charts is my model.  Pretty damn close. 

Now, let’s compare my model versus what LinkedIn reports and at the same time compare Pure Storage against their competitors to see if they have a different hiring strategy.

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Note: The light orange is my model and the rest is all LinkedIn data.  Since Pure Storage’s 10Q and 10K data lumps Sales and Marketing together, I assumed the marketing figure from LinkedIn is fairly accurate and used that for my model’s (light orange) figure for Marketing here (6.5%) and the remainder of the S&M goes to Sales.   

Amazing how accurate my model of the Pure Storage number of employees created off of 10Q and 10K data is compared to what LinkedIn shows.

Note that my analysis shows that Pure Storage has a heavy portion of their employees in the Sales department versus their peers.   Surprisingly, Pure Storage’s marketing team has a fairly industry standard portion of employees in it.

Just for fun, let’s look at the geographic distribution of Pure’s employees:

Can’t see the image above? Click here

I encourage you to read my other posts covering Pure Storage. There is way more to learn from their financials than just the Pure Storage number of employees. 🙂 Click here to see all my posts related to Pure Storage

Until next time!
-Ryan

Disclosure: I don’t own any stock or have any positions in Pure Storage.  I work for a competitor of Pure Storage (I work at Hitachi Vantara); my views in no way reflect that of my employer.  I also am not an expert in analyzing financial reports but do have a decently educated head on my shoulders; If you see something wrong in my analysis then please be kind and point it out to me so I can learn from your expertise.