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Bolt announces layoffs

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Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#391

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

whoisjuan wrote: post #287
nrmitchi wrote: post #33

First of all, there is no mention of what percentage of their workforce is being directly effected by this. I suspect it is not small. That aside, I fail to see this as anything other than this "company" taking advantage of the current environment to execute layoffs in a way that lets them blame "the market" rather than their own short-comings. We saw this in March 2020 as well. They overhired for the hype, and now a…

I hope this doesn’t sound pedantic but it’s “affected”, not “effected”. It’s an error I see a lot and it’s easy to fix if you just remember that “affect” means “to impact”. So if what you’re trying to say someone or something was impacted by something else, you say “affected”. Also as a general rule of thumb “effected” while grammatically correct is rarely ever used in colloquial talk in the context of what it means…

They're actually pretty close and confusing:

Affect is the influence or impact on something.

Effect is the result of the influence or impact on something.

The simplest way to think about it is that 'affect' is a verb and 'effect' is a noun, but they refer to essentially the same thing (you could define 'affect' as 'to have an effect on' something). But even that is confused by things like the verb phrase 'effect change'.

Which word you use might actually just come down to which way you're talking about something, but broadly affect is the action and effect is the result.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#392

Post by PragmaticPulp »

sparrc wrote: post #368

I'm a bit naive on this space so forgive if this is an ignorant question; Can anyone explain how any of these companies (Bolt, Fast, 1o) are doing anything different than "checkout with paypal"? What exactly is wrong with paypal that would make a merchant want to use Bolt instead?

The idea is that a central 1-click checkout provider will store your payment information, shipping address, and other details after the first time you use a site with their checkout.

The next time you checkout on any website that uses the same 1-click checkout provider, they already have your information for “1-click” checkout.

The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winner-take-all market where every shop wants to use the 1-click provider with the largest customer base. This is the magical “network effect” that investors want to see. If it works and becomes ubiquitous, the network effects would be massive.

So far, none of the providers have managed to get much traffic at all. The common theme is that integrating 1-click checkout into everyone’s different web store has been a much bigger engineering challenge than they expected. They’re burning cash at shocking rates to do all of these custom integrations but not getting enough return on investment.

It’s also entirely unclear why Shopify or Stripe or another provider wouldn’t just step in and use their scale to make this happen themselves. I kind of suspect few people actually want 1-click checkout to begin with.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#394

Post by synu »

berberous wrote: post #126
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't see why it should be illegal Borrowing against one's shares shouldn't be illegal. Companies lining up recourse financing for their employees should. How were the terms of the loans chosen? Who knew who was and wasn't participating? How was it ensured this wouldn't factor into personnel decisions? How were/are the people setting the strike prices of options segregated from the people setting the terms of the l…

The strike prices of options are set based on a 409A valuation. These are "cashless" loans, which are recourse for tax purposes (so that the IRS respects this as a true purchase of shares, in order to start people's LTCG and QSBS clocks). The terms were likely very favorable, i.e. set with an interest rate equivalent to the AFR. This is not a situation in which the company is trying to make money as a lender. This is…

If you can’t afford to buy your options, but take out a personal loan to buy them, that must have been a riskier approach than just buying them if you had the cash, no? The leverage increases the personal risk at least as I understand how that works.

Unless there was an agreement to forgive the loans if the options go underwater, which I haven’t seen reported here.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#395

Post by sodapopcan »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #382
abraxas wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a much less sexy but profitable and still under-served market - industrial monitoring and process improvement.

How do you even go about going to a factory and convincing people that they need a certain piece of software? Did you work in this space and already have connections?

I'm butting in here because this struck a chord.

There are lots of people of people out there running highly profitable (and globally well-known) businesses off of Excel sheets. They have identified that they don't want to do this anymore as these sheets have grown so monstrously complex over the years that the employees who have to use them are miserable. Basically there is lots of opportunity to start a tech company whose sole purpose is to get much bigger businesses off of Excel. However, for reasons, this is much harder than it sounds.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#396

Post by jupp0r »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #364
version_five wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen companies with less revenue and a bigger workforce growing at that rate. They call it blitz-scaling, and I don't know if it's actually ever worked, where I saw it first hand it was basically just setting a pile of money on fire.

In a way it seems like SWE jobs in tech hubs are subsidized by VCs. We can see it as some huge redistribution of wealth.

Only a fraction of software engineers work for VC backed companies.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#397

Post by lazide »

Semaphor wrote: post #388
Aeolun wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers do not like paypal? At least I don’t like Paypal.

Curious, why? I could understand it as merchant, but as customer, PP has great customer protection (including partial chargebacks, free return shipping, etc.)

They’re notorious for freezing peoples accounts for no reason or recourse and generally being terrible to deal with.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#398

Post by koreth1 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #392
sparrc wrote: post #368

I'm a bit naive on this space so forgive if this is an ignorant question; Can anyone explain how any of these companies (Bolt, Fast, 1o) are doing anything different than "checkout with paypal"? What exactly is wrong with paypal that would make a merchant want to use Bolt instead?

The idea is that a central 1-click checkout provider will store your payment information, shipping address, and other details after the first time you use a site with their checkout. The next time you checkout on any website that uses the same 1-click checkout provider, they already have your information for “1-click” checkout. The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winn…

> The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winner-take-all market where every shop wants to use the 1-click provider with the largest customer base.

Not saying you're wrong about that being the thesis, but the thesis makes no sense to me. It assumes that consumers are selecting shopping sites based on which payment service the sites use rather than on, say, price or selection.

The target market this investment thesis depends on is people who say, "I found a site with just the thing I wanted, but to buy it, I would have to enter my payment information! Guess it's back to Google to see if someone else has it at a similar price, and if not, I just won't buy it at all." Because the moment you give in and enter your payment and shipping details into a second checkout provider, that provider becomes just as convenient for future purchases as your first one.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#399

Post by nthngtshr »

nklende wrote: post #36
Lapz wrote: post #2

The founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt at an ~11B valuation when they only did $5.2M in Q1…

I had a smaller YC company pitch me something like this as an option for my stock comp - an RSA (restricted stock agreement, or "founder's stock"), where I put up all the cash up front, paid a big income tax bill in the first year, but then upside was all capital gains. I would technically own the stock but I had to sell it back for nothing if I left before it vested. Turned out I left very early because the company…

See, generally speaking I don't think this is a bad deal.

I mean, I don't know the exact numbers / company profile. But I was in a similar situation 8 years ago. I could early exercise and I did. Estimating taxes was a pain (but a fun challenge too, lol). A couple of years ago they finally had a liquidity event and doing all these exercise shenanigans saved me a ton of money, so I'm glad I did that.

The business was doing well and I knew exactly what the risks were and I knew I could afford to lose that money. I joined early so it wasn't that much money to begin with.

I guess my point is that I wouldn't be too dismissive of early exercise / RSAs / etc — for the right kind of person / company it could be a great tool.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#400

Post by lazide »

dehrmann wrote: post #337
tootie wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say the same about how Uber has thousands of engineers working on an app with 6 screens.

Others have mentioned scale. The other thing Uber has to do is optimize well. It needs to state competitive with Lyft for both passengers and drivers, minimize driver churn (but not too much), optimize matching, and charge predicted fares accurately. Uber also processes an insane number of transactions. Not quite Visa, but I'd guess it's in the top 5% of volume as a merchant.

Uber also was wasting a huge amount of time and energy and most of the engineers didn’t have anything productive to do. At least that’s what I gathered from some ex Uber folks.
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