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…
Weaveworks is shutting down
101–110 of 266 posts
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#102I 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…
That's probably pretty brutal summary of most of past two decades I guess?
Also, had it been bootstrapped, might have a different outcome, could scale down, pivot while staying a small profitable shop.
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#103I 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…
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 aquihired, but it fell apart at the last moment (It's not uncommon)
> Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.
because probably they looked at the pipeline and realised that if they wanted to deliver the features/customer growth they needed, they required 200 people to get there.
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Air has been let out" in the sense that it's moved past the trough of disillusionment and is on its way to the plateau of productivity[1]. There are still a few people in the trough of disillusionment yelling about how a $5/month VPS is all you'll ever need, or a $50/month bare metal colocated server is all you'll ever need. But for the most part the people who benefit from cloud services & containerization will use…
Like with big data I think most orgs (>80%) just don't need it due to the extra complexity. They might as well just use something managed like fargate and go back to building their own products.
It reduces what "most orgs" are (as if 80% of businesses are the same, or solve the same problems, or have the same challenges, or use the same approaches, or have the same customers, have the same staff or expertise, budgets, timelines, etc, etc, etc.). Clearly there is no such thing as "most orgs", as there are many different kinds of businesses and how they approach solving problems varies from business to business. Their use of technology to solve problems also can't be easily reduced; the way the business chooses to solve problems doesn't necessarily dictate what technology they should use.
It correlates the need for complexity with whether an organization is in some 20% minority of organizations, as if only a minority of orgs should or shouldn't use a complex tool.
It reduces a given tool down to "complex or not", as if complexity is the only consideration of whether to use a tool or not. There may be many different reasons to use a tool regardless of whether it's complex.
It assumes that a given tool has some inherent complexity that isn't comparable to other tools. Other tools might have less inherent complexity, but their lack of complexity may then create new problems that have to be solved, which just moves the complexity from the tool to a bunch of other places.
Overall, it correlates the way you solve problems, with how complex a tool is, with whether your organization is of one of two large generic groups. This is such a sweeping conclusion that it would be impossible to prove or demonstrate.
Based on your comment about them "using Fargate" instead, I'm assuming what you're actually saying is you think people should be using a managed product which uses containerization [and possibly k8s], rather than managing a complex technology themselves. I agree. But that doesn't mean we can generalize about who should be using what and when.
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#105I 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…
Sometimes investors have no interest in anything but a large exit. So it's large exit or bust. Building something stable that grows at a reasonable pace is considered the worst outcome because it both consumes investors time/energy and delays closure of a fund. They're left holding shares that are illiquid. It's perverse of course but it can be something baked into the structure of how VCs and other funds work.
More specifically, how much is a SAFE for 7% of a small business worth? If there are no liquidity events it will be impossible for investors to even get their money back let alone outperform SPX
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#106I 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…
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#107Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#108I 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.
"Air has been let out" in the sense that it's moved past the trough of disillusionment and is on its way to the plateau of productivity[1]. There are still a few people in the trough of disillusionment yelling about how a $5/month VPS is all you'll ever need, or a $50/month bare metal colocated server is all you'll ever need. But for the most part the people who benefit from cloud services & containerization will use…
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#109I 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…
Re: Weaveworks is shutting down
#110The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt. If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!