No surprise.
CRM and similar are used by many outbound groups, including recruiters.
Recruiting shrunk except for senior tech and executives.
Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
341–350 of 355 posts
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what do SFDC data export costs currently look like? Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
The APIs are convoluted and weird and have rate limits and daily quotas all over the place but no service costs to syphon data out afaik. Perhaps increased limits are bundled into other license costs. Their pricing and permissions models are both hard to understand too :)
Thanks! Was honestly curious to hear from someone who probably spends more time in the space.
I've only been exposed to it on ad hoc projects, but I've heard customers say they limit the amount of what they stream into their warehouses for (reasons).
I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing model hits it, even obliquely. They've built a nice "Salesworld" toll-bridged garden. Everything sales needs must be transferred in. Everything sales has that everyone else needs must be transferred out. :/
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
I continue to not understand the position that the default provider of health insurance has to be either your employer or the government. What makes it fundamentally different from housing, food, or transportation, where you just pay money and there's assistance for people who can't afford it?
Companies have leverage due to size that individuals do not. Private insurance for worse coverage than I have now (and mine is good) is almost 2x what I and my employer pay.
So why can't you and a thousand of your closest friends get together and organise private health insurance for you as a collective? Then you get the size leverage. You would also be able to pay off the risks that one person might face, because although some of you will have high health care demands, chances are some of you won't. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? By competition, arbitrarge, etc?
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get where you're coming from, but since the dawn of SaaS we've had rules of thumb about LTV-to-CAC, CAC payback period, etc. Most SaaS founders know that a 3:1 ratio between LTV and CAC is ideal - and while arguments might hold water that a worse ratio is OK for a brief period, I don't think anyone involved doesn't realize that it's difficult to sustain that. The mental magic trick to justify it probably goes like…
Why does real LTV have to be greater than CAC. Can you explain that to me? If you’re LTV is actually higher than LTV can’t you finance the difference?
The problem is that if LTV LTV = the expected cashflows on a gross margin basis, for the life of the customer. If you get $100 @ 80% gross margin, you have $80 gross margin profit per year. If you lose 100% of your clients after 3 years, you expect to make $80+$80+$80 = $240 of profit. Ah but you also need to discount those future cashflows (let's use a discount rate of 10%). So you really are making $80 + ($80 x 0.9)+($80 x 0.9^2) = $217.
That's your total LTV. Your total profit from the client before ANY "operating expenses" like Sales and Marketing costs and salaries, Rent, Overheads, R&D costs and salaries, office supplies, professional services, etc.
So OK you have $217 of LTV. But you have to spend $250 of CAC (which is "total sales and marketing spending and salaries divided by total new clients added") then you are losing $33 per customer BEFORE all the money you're spending on everything else required to run the business.
Now, of course, reality isn't this simple. And it's not all VC bullshit. Maybe this LTV is dramatically underselling the value of having that client, because in Year 2, you'll have New Product Module ready to sell them for $75. And your cost to sell (CAC) that module to them is $1 - since you've already done the hard work of getting them as a client. So now you adjust your LTV calculation and it's not quite as bad.
Or... by having 100,000 customers, network effects mean that either the lifetime of a customer is actually 10 years (vs 3) or the network effects mean you can monetize something else or... lots of arguments you could make for "grabbing the real estate now".
So if VCs -- who aren't idiots even if some are morally questionable -- see a path to greater LTV, you can kind of get comfortable with a higher CAC.
BUT AGAIN - the rule of thumb is that 3:1 is healthy, since that provides gross margin profit from the get-go, and any other LTV expansion from upsells is gravy.
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
The letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.
I read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed". So same result, to some extent.
FWIW, I was laid off earlier in the year, and was put on garden leave for 60 days. My vesting stopped immediately, even though I was still employed for 2 months.
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.
Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.
Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after.
My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not when US immigration policy is so restrictive and hostile. We are actively preventing our own prosperity in the pursuit of protectionism.
Immigration can lower wages of existing citizens that are theoretically who a democratic government and its policies should be working for
Then allow immigration from rich countries? It's incredibly hard to immigrate even from a rich european country to the US.
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.
Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after. My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.
You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice)
Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages
Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it. Employment should be easy to find, switch and end. More like dating than marriage.
Nah, the average human being wants a career. Not everyone is like SWE who feel comfortable hopping jobs every two years and never really settling in.
To me, a career is something you have in an industry, not in a company.