Bolt announces layoffs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#281

Post by datavirtue » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:33 AM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #24

upupandup wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There IS risk to the employee; they now have a real loan outstanding and 100% personal recourse, so if the common stock becomes less than exercise price, their personal assets are on the hook https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1493390184897032201 HOLY CRAP. How is this even legal???

I can't see why it should be illegal. People take on debt to buy assets all the time. But this is just so irresponsible and immoral; I really doubt the leadership is actually running a sustainable business; and I'm also starting to seriously doubt there was any credibility to the whole YC/Stripe boys club thing. 1. Ryan (was) the CEO, and can pressure employees to buy stock (or let them go because they aren't "commit…

"If leadership plays so fast and loose with other people's money, you have to question how well they are doing their job."

Does that apply to Elon Musk as well? Leveraging Tesla to buy fucking Twitter when he could have had a strategic stake in Ford for less?

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#282

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:35 AM UTC

myth2018 wrote: post #195

peripitea wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a euphemism? Delaying profits as a primary objective has been a common startup strategy for decades.

Delaying profits is a perfectly valid strategy, but that implies intent. I guess however most of these modern startups are having no profits because they aren't managing to make them, and not as part of a bigger strategy.

Exactly. Delaying profits means having a knob in your cash allocation (usually sales) that you can turn down and become profitable. If you turn it down and still can't fund the company... you weren't delaying profits.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#283

Post by PheonixPharts » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:37 AM UTC

IMTDb wrote: post #158

nrmitchi wrote: post #33

First of all, there is no mention of what percentage of their workforce is being directly effected by this. I suspect it is not small. That aside, I fail to see this as anything other than this "company" taking advantage of the current environment to execute layoffs in a way that lets them blame "the market" rather than their own short-comings. We saw this in March 2020 as well. They overhired for the hype, and now a…

Both "we overhired" and "it's because of the market" can be true at the same time. You get a $335 million in Feb with a common understanding with current investors that you are going to raise $ XXX in roughly 24 month, depending on results compared to an agreed upon business plan. You thus plan for a roughly 24 month runway. 4 month later (now) you get a call from your investors that your planned next series is going…

Who in the world didn't foresee the market cooling dramatically as the pandemic "ended"?

I remember interviewing at real estate start ups during the pandemic hiring like crazy, as if this wasn't obviously a temporary boom period.

The problem is that the vast majority of startups suffer from a Markov memory problem where they can't fathom a world different from their current state no matter how absurd that view is to anyone with common sense.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#284

Post by neffy » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:37 AM UTC

015a wrote: post #186

The funny thing about recessions, and macroeconomics as a whole; much of the time, we eat the food we cook. If there is an upcoming recession, the most likely root cause is that a bunch of people believed there will be an upcoming recession.

That's the convenient mythology.

De facto - bear in mind the system that we´re talking about moves rather slowly - recessions always have real financial or economic system causes, and quite often are seen coming in advance by some people.

People who are at the right points in the financial system, who for example can see bad debt starting to build up (takes months, but there's always a clear pattern of people starting to skip payments etc), companies starting to run out of runway with no revenue coming in, again their banks will typically be able to spot this fairly quickly. Changes in fuel costs are very significant, especially in the US, too many people drive too far to work, petrol goes up, this multiplies quickly - this one hasn't even really hit the system yet, wait for winter.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#285

Post by adrr » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:40 AM UTC

tootie wrote: post #277

adrr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard they had 900 employees. It's just a checkout page that plugs into your payment processor. I don't get why they need so many people. Most complicated thing they are probably doing is tokenizing the credit card themselves so the card info is portable across merchants with different processor.

I say the same about how Uber has thousands of engineers working on an app with 6 screens.

Uber has scale, they are processing $15+ billion plus in rides a year. Millions of customers and millions of drivers that need tools built to service them.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#286

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:41 AM UTC

throwaabolt wrote: post #164

DevToRecruiter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry you're going through this. I don't know what your position is but I may be able to help you with the "finding a new job" part of your anxiety. Please feel free to reach out to me on twitter @devetorecruiter. Good luck with everything!

thank you. can my wife's boyfriend contact you too? he is part of the layoff as well.

[deleted]

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#287

Post by whoisjuan » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

nrmitchi wrote: post #33

First of all, there is no mention of what percentage of their workforce is being directly effected by this. I suspect it is not small. That aside, I fail to see this as anything other than this "company" taking advantage of the current environment to execute layoffs in a way that lets them blame "the market" rather than their own short-comings. We saw this in March 2020 as well. They overhired for the hype, and now a…

I hope this doesn’t sound pedantic but it’s “affected”, not “effected”. It’s an error I see a lot and it’s easy to fix if you just remember that “affect” means “to impact”.

So if what you’re trying to say someone or something was impacted by something else, you say “affected”.

Also as a general rule of thumb “effected” while grammatically correct is rarely ever used in colloquial talk in the context of what it means which is executed or produced. So people almost always mean “affected” when they make this mistake.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#288

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:43 AM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #256

urthor wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The way to do layoffs is simple. You get managers to stack rank the lot, then you get every single person with 30 or more reports under them in a room. Then you do the whole layoff in one 5 hour meeting. Swing the axe and get it done in 2 days.

I used to work “doing layoffs” and I don’t think I ever saw stack ranking as the layoff strategy. Most often I saw “divisions” or “capabilities” cut, either entirely or to skeleton crews that kept the lights on. Next was just randomly applied. And frankly managers with 30 or more reports were frequently layoff targets as they are expensive and don’t add a ton of obvious value to the bottom line (unless they had a sal…

Was always curious about that from an outcome perspective. It seemed like a company could go "manager-lean" (ax manager count, retain employees) for awhile, easier than vice versus.

I'd imagine a lot of paperwork got back up, but presumably the company business roughly kept going. True or false?

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#289

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:45 AM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #275

colinmhayes wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the established big tech companies are sitting on mountains of cash. I suspect they’ll start ramping up buybacks even more aggressively due to what they see as undervalued equity.

Yep, blowing the cash on stock buybacks. And then layoffs when the cash gets uncomfortably low.

The cash won't get "uncomfortably low" for profitable money printing machines (e.g. Apple) for quite a long time.

They just won't have quite as obscenely large of a dragon-esque hoard to sleep on.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#290

Post by altdataseller » Thu, May 26, 2022, 1:47 AM UTC

abraxas wrote: post #273

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #49

Rumors going around on blind (posted by bolt employees) that over the course of a few rounds of layoffs it will be 30-50% of the total workforce. A lot of the initial layoff are software engineers. Apparently they only have 12-18 months of runway, and need to effectively double that. Current revenue is 40M. I guess this is the beginning of the tech washout. clings to large tech company job EDIT: 33% layoff today

40M in revenue for the year?! Jesus, my startup is making about half that with a good sales pipeline for this year and we are 55 employees total. We might hire additional handful this year but that's it. How do you even onboard when you double your workforce every few months?

Congrats on building a company that is making money sustainably.