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Oyster is shutting down

blog.oysterbooks.com

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Re: Oyster is shutting down

#71

Post by jevgeni »

e28eta wrote: post #26
macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is it fair to Oyster's investors? The alternative is ... what? -- Actually it looks like Google will pay back investors some or all of their investment.

From the linked recode article: "But sources said it will end up paying investors, who put a reported $17 million into the company, for the right to hire some of its staff." That sure sounds similar to the anti-poaching agreements that Google, Apple, etc already got in trouble for. What makes this different? Why shouldn't it just be a free market for these employees (and founders), and Google is free to offer that mo…

Well, in a free market the possibility of a big player to poach the core of a company would be priced in by the investor. I'd expect to see a lot less equity and a lot more debt-like VC deals at vastly lower valuations.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#72

Post by bgilroy26 »

qq66 wrote: post #63
philtar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library. I am a full time professional software developer and I do a lot of technology things on the side and have a technology side business. It took me forever to connect a kindle to my library, and when I did, most of the books I wanted weren't available.

An example of "beginner's luck," which is often the tendency of experts to overthink things when just trying the most basic thing often works. :)

Also libraries and their features can be very regional.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#73

Post by bryanlarsen »

This post has been on the front page for 9 hours and yet no mention of their most direct competitor, Scribd? Not a good sign for Scribd, that's for sure.

Both Scribd and Oyster had a much wider selection of books from major publishers than Kindle Unlimited. They both had 3 of the big 5 publishers on board.

Myself, I love Scribd, and I suggest you give it a try too. I haven't tried Oyster because it wasn't available in my country.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#74

Post by hollerith »

verinus wrote: post #69
hollerith wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a (first generation) Kindle Paperwhite and don't understand why people rave about screen. I prefer the screen on my 13-year-old computer monitor and would continue to prefer it even if it were the same size as the Paperwhite's screen provided that it were on a device as portable as the Paperwhite.

funny. i own one too and it blows every computer screen- especially when i want to read on the couch or in bed or on may veranda or in my garend- in short in sunlight...

In sunlight, yes, it is far superior to LCD technology, of course.

It's rare for me to want to read in sunlight, however.

To those who don't own one: just like any LCD, that is, any display in a modern laptop, tablet or smartphone excepting only smartphones with electroluminescent displays (which are probably restricted to some high-end models by Samsung, which have AMOLED displays) the display on the Paperwhite has a "diffuser", a white semi-transparent sheet of plastic inside which light bounces around a lot and an LED light source attached to one or more edges of the diffuser.

It is not possible to turn off light source completely off without turning off the Paperwhite's display (which means you cannot continue turning pages) though in daylight the light source is as good as off because of the much greater intensity of the light coming from the sky.

Point is that the "electronic ink" display technology in its latest iterations (i.e., since the introduction of the Paperwhite) is not that different from LCD technology; and I personally prefer the details of the implementation of LCD tech -- for reasons I cannot explain, but which probably derive from the fact that much more engineering effort has been expended on refining the tech.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#75

Post by zero-rated »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #60
rahimnathwani wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kindle Unlimited has a killer feature Oyster never had -- Kindles." That, and an enormous selection. "Reading books on phones is awful." It depends on the phone. Many people are perfectly happy reading for hours on a phone screen, particularly if they can choose the foreground/background colours (e.g. white on black for someone with an AMOLED screen). "Reading them on Kindles is the closest screens can come to readi…

I pay for Kindle Unlimited and can say first-hand that it has a terrible selection of mostly self-published and second rate books. Kindle itself of course has the best selection, but that's on a pay-per-book model. The brilliant thing about Oyster was that they have so much first rate material in their "unlimited" model. There are plenty of arguments to be made about how many books you can read a month etc., but thos…

Initially, I thought the Kindle Unlimited selection was lacking, but most searches turn up at least one or two useful books I'd have impulsively purchased anyway. Definitely worth it for me.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#77

Post by angeNoble »

zaroth wrote: post #43
nstart wrote: post #38

Can someone explain the math here? 2012 they received 3M in seed funding. 2014 they received 14M USD. The picture on that boat shows 26 (?) people. So let's assume 26 people were always in the company just for kicks. Between 2012 October and 2015 September they ran out of 17M USD. That's a burn rate of 5.67M USD per year. For 26 employees, if we stupidly assumed no other costs, that nearly 218k USD salary per year. O…

Wages are at most 70% of the cost of an employee to a business, and possibly as low as 50% of the fully burdened cost. For an employee to gross $100k on their paystub (before their own taxes), a competitive employer in NYC is likely paying a full burden (with payroll taxes, insurance, other benefits, admin overhead, office space, and supplies) not too far from $218k.

Which makes it even more crazy that after the employee pays taxes, the take home only about 70% of that.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#78

Post by bane »

nstart wrote: post #38

Can someone explain the math here? 2012 they received 3M in seed funding. 2014 they received 14M USD. The picture on that boat shows 26 (?) people. So let's assume 26 people were always in the company just for kicks. Between 2012 October and 2015 September they ran out of 17M USD. That's a burn rate of 5.67M USD per year. For 26 employees, if we stupidly assumed no other costs, that nearly 218k USD salary per year. O…

An easy way to guesstimate how long a company's investment will last (given no other revenue) is to just assume each person they have on staff costs between $200-$250k per year.

It's not perfectly accurate, but it's surprisingly good in terms of figuring out runway. Staffing costs are typically the lions share of business costs for software companies. This gets weird if they do lots of advertising, or have enormous hosting costs or something, but it's usually on the order of 70-80% of the total operating costs (by comparison renting physical locations like offices is usually among the cheapest).

So let's assume they had 26 people, that's between $5.2m-6.5m per year...right in line with what the actual math shows ($5.67m).

There's other ways of estimating, like if you think a company is running cheap you can go with the old "10 people for a million dollars a year" guess, but I've found that to be increasingly inaccurate.

The reason the numbers look like this isn't because that's what people get paid, but because of all the other cost burdens on having employees -- most of which are already covered here.

It's also one of those things that makes me scratch my head when startups hire huge staffs too early. In good markets, hiring loads of people isn't a huge deal, but burning millions per year you don't have doesn't make much sense.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#79

Post by bane »

x0x0 wrote: post #70
nstart wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's amazing. I genuinely had no idea that the costs of running could be that high. Thanks for sharing that info. It boggles my mind as to how much money startups probably need just to stay break even.

I think the parent's estimate is a little high, but here's what I know. w2 employers are responsible for - 6.2% SS + 1.45% medicare fica taxes - health insurance, of which the employer's share can easily run $1k/mo for a couple in their 30s - 1.5% payroll tax if in sf, or 0.34% payroll tax for mta in nyc; so if someone makes $100k in sf, the employer pays (1.0 + 0.0765 fica + 0.015 city payroll tax) * 100k + 12*1k he…

You also have to consider employees who make money vs. employees who cost money. Administrative overhead, management, etc. aren't often major contributors to revenue, but their cost metrics are the same. So the burden on money making employees can be considered to be even higher.

You can get some economies of scale with more revenue generating employees vs. cost center employees, but no matter what, as companies grow they need cost center employees to make the ship sail.

Re: Oyster is shutting down

#80

Post by mkaziz »

philtar wrote: post #59
tiffanyh wrote: post #41

I never understood Oyster business model. My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library. He literally checks out nearly any book, all FOR FREE and reads it on his kindle. Maybe this is a US centric thing and Oyster was targeting international users. But local libraries have been offering this service of digitally checking out books (even current books) for free for n…

> My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library. I am a full time professional software developer and I do a lot of technology things on the side and have a technology side business. It took me forever to connect a kindle to my library, and when I did, most of the books I wanted weren't available.

It also depends on the library. My small suburban library doesn't have a lot of ebook offerings, but my friend's big urban library has about a 75% hit rate on books I want to read.
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