Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Weaveworks is shutting down

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 266 posts

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#141

Post by bogomipz »

propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a lo…

>"According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company"

Where in the linkedin post does the CEO state that?

My understanding is that they reduced headcount greatly over the last couple of years and were well below a 100 people. The source of this was a then current employee that my company interviewed in November.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#142

Post by bogomipz »

orsenthil wrote: post #101
propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a lo…

I think, motivation would have been, if they were able to sell themselves as 200 person company, the CEO and Board would gotten a bigger piece of the pie in the landing space.

As I pointed out elsewhere the 200 person company is not accurate. The OP is quoting something listed as "peak" on Linkedin without even providing a reference. And for some reason everyone is running with that figure. Nearly every tech company had a peak headcount during the height of Covid. Techcrunch generally also has inaccurate tech company numbers in their profiles. Also you can't sell yourself as a 200 person company if you don't actually have 200 people as that would come out immediately in any due diligence an acquiring company would would do on you.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#143

Post by ska »

girvo wrote: post #128
ssharp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shoot for the moon" seems like a reasonable strategy when you're making the investment. However, certainly at some point while they were burning through that $36 million it became evident that "moon" was no longer a viable destination. Why wouldn't everyone be aligned with making the adjustments needed to get back to default alive? Something is clearly better than nothing. Now if it got to the stage where the CEO no…

> Something is clearly better than nothing. To you and I, this is patently obvious. This is not true however for VCs. In a lot of them, they'd prefer you fail entirely rather than limp along making 1x, 1.5x their investment. Zeroing out is preferable sometimes, weirdly.

> Zeroing out is preferable sometimes, weirdly.

It's not even weird. A "live" project requires effort, and that has opportunity cost.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#144

Post by goalonetwo »

propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a lo…

we all know that once you get 36 Million$ of investment, you cannot "just" run a 50 people startup that will have a stable valuation of maybe 100m$.

Once you take big investment it comes with the expectation you will get to 500m$ at least. VCs don't want to 2x their money. They want a small chance of 20x.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#146

Post by goalonetwo »

rdedev wrote: post #133
KaiserPro wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed. Because that is what startups do. 80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern You shoot for the moon, if you don't take massive risks, then you won't be rewarded. It sounded like they were about to be bought out or…

>80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern Doesn't this sound like selection bias? If every other startup follows this shoot fornthe moon plan then yeah it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy

it completely is and that is the point of the comment.

You never hear of the 95% of unsuccessful startups

But everyone is following the runbook as if they were the successful 1% (not even the successful 5%, they all act as if they are the top 1%)

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#147

Post by goalonetwo »

gtirloni wrote: post #28
mad_vill wrote: post #13

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

> that was so popular in the late 2010s Was? What's more popular than that today?

Since the end of the free money era, a lot of people are rightly questioning the microservice/k8s/cloud-native model that requires you to run an operation team of 20 people and has a baseline cost of 200k$/year for a cluster that doesn't do anything yet.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#148

Post by kbumsik »

orsenthil wrote: post #88

https://eksctl.io/ is a very useful tool developed and maintained by weaveworks. I hope it will continue to see development and maintenance despite this news. Sad to see a good startup folding up. All the best for your next adventure.

eksctl should be fine.

It is the official recommend tool by AWS and eksctl examples are everywhere in the AWS documentation.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#150

Post by goalonetwo »

That whole CloudNative industry seems to be going downhill since the end of the free-money era.

It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S.

But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.

Post reply on HN