What people don’t know is the CEO Ryan Breslinlow founded the company that constructed the loans. He played both sides.
Bolt Financial's loans come due
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just about to make this point. How does "one click checkout" become worth $11B? (massive) Capital misallocation, i'd imagine
According to a comment on another thread [1], their annual revenue is $40M. That's a valuation of 275x revenue. And they were seeking to raise another $400M at a $14B valuation [2] — 350x annual revenue! Truly mind boggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation...
I also wonder if that revenue is just the payments they process. If so then true revenue is probably ~2.5% of that.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#43> 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…
But if they did that, it would set a precedent that is going to come back to bite them when they have to let the rest of the staff go eventually.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#44I 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.
Checkout is a problem that requires low latency, high reliability, and difficult decisions about fraud to be decided at the moment. These are hard problems which are interesting to many engineers.
It is also a high-value problem, and thus there is compensation to support the hard work.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#45Maybe 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 layi…
Did they have significant growth recently? It's possible they're laying off mostly newer employees who may not have even vested yet.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#46This is why you should early exercise and file an 83B election whenever possible.
Personally would avoid working at any startup that is in the awkward middle stage and would require you to shell out six figures just to exercise some questionable options especially now. Either join a very small company in the early stages where the valuation is still low or join a late stage or public company where you vest RSUs and don’t have to deal with options at all.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to a comment on another thread [1], their annual revenue is $40M. That's a valuation of 275x revenue. And they were seeking to raise another $400M at a $14B valuation [2] — 350x annual revenue! Truly mind boggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation...
I also wonder if that revenue is just the payments they process. If so then true revenue is probably ~2.5% of that.
As shady as this company is, I would honestly be shocked if they counted the full value of the payment processed as revenue.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#48What people don’t know is the CEO Ryan Breslinlow founded the company that constructed the loans. He played both sides.
Do they think they can get people to pay money back after terminating their employment?
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#49This is why you should early exercise and file an 83B election whenever possible. Personally would avoid working at any startup that is in the awkward middle stage and would require you to shell out six figures just to exercise some questionable options especially now. Either join a very small company in the early stages where the valuation is still low or join a late stage or public company where you vest RSUs and d…
Sure, but this isn't realistic. Like you said, most people can't afford to exercise early. Even at a small company, most people don't have an extra $10k to gamble on a startup that may go nowhere.
This is what Bolt was trying to solve. They did it the wrong way and hurt a lot of people, but they were trying to give people the opportunity to exercise early.
The correct answer is a 10-year extended window. It's not perfect, and there are downsides. But it's (currently) the fairest way to issue stock options to employees. By the time it comes time to exercise, the employee will be significantly de-risked because they'll know how the company is doing.
Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about the people in the situation you described.
Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.