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Bolt Financial's loans come due

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Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#51

Post by fundad »

xwdv wrote: post #34

Imagine if getting fired and immediately owing a vast sum of money to your employer became a common practice at most companies. Might lead the way to higher levels of employee retention and may be seen as some kind of solution to people not doing their jobs or doing the bare minimum just for a paycheck, especially in undesirable but necessary jobs.

Imagine getting paid back by someone you just terminated. It's fantasy, fuck these guys.

Seriously pay nothing back until you speak to a lawyer. Bolt will be out of business by the time the loans go into collection, then offer to settle for $1.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#52

Post by pevey »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #10

I 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.

And it's a one-click checkout that they apparently don't event WANT to be widely adopted. There is no pricing info on their web site. It is a "call us" type of sales pipeline. I pointed this out in another thread yesterday, and some people responded that this is fine because it is geared toward enterprise. But it's really not fine. It turns a lot of companies away, even somewhat large one. And the nature of the product is that they want network effects. They want it to be widely adopted. Trying to do that from the largest companies down was a poor strategy. The early adopters will be the mid-size companies with involved owner willing to try something new. Then the enterprise sheep and time-crunched small businesses will follow, after they see others using it. But a meaningful portion of mid-sized companies who are interested get lost in the very first step of the funnel, when they get to the site and can't find even basic information about how much it would cost.

Compare this to Stripe (which I currently use at 2 different companies in 2 different industries) which manages to be very transparent about all pricing and still have an enterprise sales channel that can make larger deals with discounts.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#53

Post by kaesar14 »

czbond wrote: post #37
bastawhiz wrote: post #27

Maybe 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…

You need more facts - the loans may not be an even distribution across 50%; I expect loan support was skewed towards the upper part of the pyramid Example - some staff may not have had loans/shares (eg; customer support, etc) and the loans may be for senior and up roles who have enough shares to worry about the high taxes on shares.

I don’t understand though, the layoffs affected a third of the company and eng was involved, how could 33% of the workforce be laid off with over half taking loans lead to single digit people in this situation? Numbers don’t add up imo.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#55

Post by gitfan86 »

madamelic wrote: post #11
hestefisk wrote: post #8

So 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.

The alternative these people had was to not exercise their shares. Do we know when those shares expired? Could they have waited until an exit to buy the options?

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#56

Post by achow »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

Maybe 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…

Doesn't this from the article clarifies that?

Maybe the layoffs were mostly of newer, unvested employees.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#57

Post by icelancer »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #10

I 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 can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT?

I'd be willing to bet like 80-90% of SWEs are just people who write code 9-5, have little passion for the job, and just collect paychecks like most people in America. HN and Slashdot and so forth provide a very skewed view on our profession.

So when Bolt offers people over-market wages for skills writing JS/PHP and some basic database stuff... a four day work week... strong culture of "doing enough" (aka Fried's mantra at Basecamp), why not take it? It's just a job to them.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#58

Post by in_cahoots »

kaesar14 wrote: post #53
czbond wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need more facts - the loans may not be an even distribution across 50%; I expect loan support was skewed towards the upper part of the pyramid Example - some staff may not have had loans/shares (eg; customer support, etc) and the loans may be for senior and up roles who have enough shares to worry about the high taxes on shares.

I don’t understand though, the layoffs affected a third of the company and eng was involved, how could 33% of the workforce be laid off with over half taking loans lead to single digit people in this situation? Numbers don’t add up imo.

If the company was growing rapidly, then maybe 33% of the workforce hadn’t vested yet?

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#59

Post by icelancer »

greatpostman wrote: post #41

What people don’t know is the CEO Ryan Breslinlow founded the company that constructed the loans. He played both sides.

People know this, it's being posted all over the Internet. However, while I think Bolt is a ridiculous company - and borderline scammy, check my comment history for my personal dealings with them - I really doubt that Ryan was in a position to seriously profit from these cashless loans.

I would guess Ryan set it up this way in compliance with IRS regulations and on advice of his internal attorneys and financial experts.

Re: Bolt Financial's loans come due

#60

Post by dntrkv »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #10

I 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.

Of all the services to complain about, one-click checkout should be near the bottom of the list.

For the users, it provides a great UX and prevents the need to give your personal/CC info to every random site that you wish to purchase from.

For the business, it can significantly improve conversion, reduce fraud, and reduce eng time for payment integration.

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