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About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#571

Post by iainctduncan »

hhsectech wrote: post #542
iainctduncan wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment , and that th…

"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it. PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for mo…

You are misunderstanding the dynamic. I mean, sure, that sometimes happens, but usually if they pay us for a report, the recommendations are shared. Either with the target company or the portco buying the target. So what we say is going to the CTO or VP Eng.

Very frequently what we are doing is providing an outside voice with a direct line to the top to recommend things the CTO or VP Eng already knows and wants to do. I have had many technical leaders personally thanks us and say how relieved they were to have diligence done by real hackers, and how much this was going to help.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#572

Post by iainctduncan »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #565
hhsectech wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it. PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for mo…

Why can't a PE firm hire an actual super-genius, who can understand things with a fraction of the usual effort? Sizable firms can easily afford a seven or eight figure compensation package for someone really really competent.

Some do, that is becoming more common. There is, understandably, a huge variety of approaches from funds. Some are very hands on and have on staff technical folks who were previously CTOs or VP Eng, others are hands off and just take care of finance.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#573

Post by fairity »

iainctduncan wrote: post #465
nluken wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity. Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s…

You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence . I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python…

> But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%)

Can you provide a source for this? I don't doubt it, but I'm wondering if this is accurate for startups that have raised seed+ funding.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#574

Post by vintermann »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #563
vintermann wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common? That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly. I coul…

The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasiona…

I see that indirectly, Spotify likes to recommend me stuff that has gotten attention from a few specific human curators: NPR desk concerts, the Mark Radcliffe Folk sessions (a BBC program I believe), and A Prairie Home Companion. So it's not an either-or, I would not even have heard of those curators without Spotify.

But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.

Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#575

Post by JohnFen »

weq wrote: post #486
JohnFen wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me as well. Streaming services don't serve my needs at all. I find algorithmic suggestions pretty much useless, but they're easy to ignore so don't really enter into it.

I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators. DI.FM is different though, its a streaming service, curated by humans (who are the worlds best DJs), has a sustainable buinsess model and lets you download streams. Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i disco…

> I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators

That's not the only alternative. I've never done that.

> Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered.

I couldn't agree more! But streaming services (or old-school radio) doesn't work well for me when it comes to discovering new music. I get that plenty of people find that a great path and more power to them.

But for me, streaming services are like radio you pay for, and music radio has never been a thing of value to me at any point in my life.

And, financially speaking, "radio you pay for" makes no sense to me. If I'm paying money, I want to have the music available to listen to any time I want, on any device I want -- not just when a DJ decides it's time to play it, or only when I have an internet connection.

But don't get me wrong -- I am not saying that streaming services are stupid and shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that they don't provide value to me, personally.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#576

Post by NoGravitas »

jmuguy wrote: post #352

I’m not sure what the experience is with other niche genres of music but I’ve found more black and death metal on Bandcamp in the past month than has ever been recommended to me elsewhere. I get the impression that HN posters who don’t use Bandcamp just see it at some place where a band can make a MySpace profile - but it has a serious network effect going on. For instance, the label 20 buck spin, has a boat load of…

Virtual labels and niche genres are Bandcamp's bread and butter. No better place for dark jazz and dark ambient, good for synthwave and noise.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#577

Post by heleninboodler »

sitkack wrote: post #258
heleninboodler wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things? It's possible that the founders felt they had accomplished this, and after spending 15 (?) years running it, were ready to move onto something else. I've sure as hell never stayed at the same job for 15 years. I'd go nuts. They may have also felt some o…

Then sell it to the employees who have a vested interest in maintaining it.

You're expecting a group of startup employees holding illiquid stock to come up with the cash necessary to buy the finders out on a company that could otherwise sell for (apparently) $273 million?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#578

Post by local_crmdgeon »

ngcazz wrote: post #174
x0x0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also could be a purely financial decision. Bandcamp claimed $51m in revenue (I assume gross?) in 2016 [1] and, per reporting, had about $20m in net revenue in 2022 [2]. With the reported 210 employees, that's $95k in net revenue (not profit -- wages / costs are not yet accounted for) per employee. That is very low. You could easily see an acquirer wanting to be more profitable and cutting things like editorial. [1…

It should be ok to not be exceedingly profitable. Bandcamp produced loads of amazing valuable content. But greedy maniacs will always hate this. I am reminded of the Craigslist leadership who was mad insulted for the conscious decision to impose an upper bound to their growth which is a refreshingly moral thing to do under capitalism

I'm excited for this vein of Leftism to end. We're seeing the DSA get chucklefucked due to their 10/7 Attack response, and we're seeing their NIMBY allies get chucklefucked in the legislatures.

Hopefully some new, more productive and positive ideology emerges.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#579

Post by smcg »

iainctduncan wrote: post #400
matthewn wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me. (Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland... )

So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high. The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid s…

You work for private equity. Private equity is the problem. You work for vampires.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#580

Post by smcg »

iainctduncan wrote: post #476
iainctduncan wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high. The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid s…

Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment , and that th…

Any "profitably" run PE company is being sold for parts and its wiring is being stripped. Good job being better than a charlatan startup. Your employer provides nothing of value to society.
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