Is it time to spin up http://fuckedcompany.com/ again?
Bolt Financial's loans come due
21–30 of 204 posts
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#22I remember interviewing with them about 2-3 years ago. Everyone seemed very enthused, but no one was able to clearly articulate for me what it was that made their product/offerings different. Glad I dodged that bullet
Same here! I just looked back through my emails to see if it was the same "Bolt" I remembered.
I always imagined it being a much smaller startup, not an $11B valuation. And it seems the market has backed me up on that.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#23I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.
To be clear, your question is asking why smart people get excited about simple things that provide a lot of value?
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#24I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.
Then you probably don’t understand the value of any big tech company? All of them are premised on ideas that are trivial on the surface but involve difficult engineering challenges at scale.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bolt should just have annulled them entirely These loans were made cashlessly as part of an early option exercise. That is steeped deeply in the internal revenue code. The forgiven principal would be at the very least income. Then the tax benefits from the early exercise would retroactively apply with penalties and interest. All of this assuming the IRS doesn't view the move as a heads I win (if the company does we…
This is sort of similar to what Evergrande was doing with executives, right? IIUC, Evergrande strongly "encouraged" execs to take loans (secured against their income - which was considerable) to buy Evergrande "investment products". Obviously, this was just a way to pay employees with their loan. If things blew up - the employee is completely screwed. If things don't blow up (which seems unlikely when an employer has…
> where you take out loans get your salary - and you only actually make money if your company grows 10x in one year - and even in that case your benefit is slim - while the VCs and founders walk off with 85% of the gains
Better: the VCs own stock with liquidation preference over the common stock they loaned you money to buy. If there's venture debt, they are also part of the estate that will be paid by those loans if the company goes bankrupt.
This all smells. Especially given, to my knowledge, Bolt didn't let even its employees take liquidity in their shares through traditional channels.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#26> A Bolt spokesperson says that only a "single digit" number of laid-off employees took out the loans, despite more than 200 people losing their jobs, and that the aggregate amount was below $200,000. Moreover, she says the company plans to "work with" those individuals. If the amount was less than $200k, which is about the salary for a single employee these days, Bolt should just have annulled them entirely. The PR…
I am not sure that is fair -- what if someone decided to buy out their vested shares with their own money? They would be screwed while those who borrowed from Bolt wouldn't be. It is just generally problematic.
Sometimes being nice ends up being unfair. Given the "talk to us we'll work something out" part of the message I bet that's what Bolt is basically doing - in the cases where people are now "screwed" they're going to arrange for a grant or something to make people whole.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#27Maybe someone can clarify this for me, because I'm not sure I understand how this is possible: when the loans were announced, it was said that ~half of employees took the loan. But here, when 200 people were laid off, only a "single digit" number of employees that were let go had these loans. Even if that number is 9, that's like 4.5% of the laid off employees.
How is that possible, except by Bolt explicitly not laying off employees with loans? I don't know if such a thing is illegal, but "you are indebted to us so we'll give you preferential treatment" doesn't feel _not_ illegal.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#28So the firm borrowed money to employees?
My understanding is that Bolt lined up loans for employees to cover employees' tax burdens due to exercising their options. In simpler words: Bolt helped employees take out personally guaranteed loans to give Bolt money. In the loan terms, if the employee leaves for any reason, the employee owes Bolt the entire loan amount within 90 days of end of employment.
> to cover employees' tax burdens due to exercising their options.
Not just the tax burdens, the exercise price as well
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#29I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.
I'm in no way defending Bolt, but your comment exudes snobbery as well as ignorance about what should drive a company's valuation. There are many incredible software engineers that care far more about the problem at hand being solved than whether the technical solution strokes their intellectual ego or not. This type of punching down at other software developers really isn't good.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#30I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.
How did an office sub-leasing company (Wework) become a tech company that was supposed to change they way we live and work and create the first trillionaire, or whatever craziness they cooked up? From what I've seen, you find a charismatic dude with a good story that they probably even believe themselves, and another dude with a lot of money who wants to make that into even more money and you get them together. Then…
How did a home rental company or a media rental company become a tech company?