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Bolt announces layoffs

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Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#331

Post by wombatpm »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #302
nivenhuh wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to make sure that well-understood criteria is followed for layoffs, or else the action might be understood as a firing. [1] This is important, because a company can be held liable for wrongful termination. [2] [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/making-layoff-decisi... [2] https://www.employmentlawfirms.com/resources/employment/wron...

About wrongful termination: Does severance pay help to reduce risk for companies? I always assume the risk comes from insufficient severance pay. My point: Even if you have grotesque firing practices, enough money can pave over the problem.

You sign an agreement Not to sue in order to get your severance. Unless you have money, bringing a suit is hard. And if you are suing a company that is slashing headcount to increase runway, what are your chances to get anything years down the road?

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#332

Post by dehrmann »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #302
nivenhuh wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to make sure that well-understood criteria is followed for layoffs, or else the action might be understood as a firing. [1] This is important, because a company can be held liable for wrongful termination. [2] [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/making-layoff-decisi... [2] https://www.employmentlawfirms.com/resources/employment/wron...

About wrongful termination: Does severance pay help to reduce risk for companies? I always assume the risk comes from insufficient severance pay. My point: Even if you have grotesque firing practices, enough money can pave over the problem.

> Does severance pay help to reduce risk for companies?

In California, severance is almost always in exchange for signing away various rights, one of which is likely any claim of wrongful termination. You can always try to negotiate the payout or the terms, though. Just expect to hear "no."

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#334

Post by bogomipz »

adrr wrote: post #316
bogomipz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have taken out a loan to buy their options? If the options are vested you can just sell them and pocket the difference between your strike price and the buy offer. If the options weren't vested you can't buy them anyway and you would still have the same strike price when they did vest.

Sell them to who? Are there any secondary market sites still running. Otherwise, you're cold calling investors. I tried to sell my shares in a startup to cover my six figure tax bill and couldn't find a buyer even with the company's CFO helping me.

The OP I was responding to was clearly talking about a publicly traded company - "the stock was at $50/share" and "Took years for the stock to recover." They could sell them to anyone who wanted to buy them and clearly people did if it was going up.

To answer your question, yes there are still companies that facilitate the secondary market for pre-IPO options, Forge/Sharespost is the one that immediately comes to mind.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#335

Post by pfarrell »

adrr wrote: post #316
bogomipz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have taken out a loan to buy their options? If the options are vested you can just sell them and pocket the difference between your strike price and the buy offer. If the options weren't vested you can't buy them anyway and you would still have the same strike price when they did vest.

Sell them to who? Are there any secondary market sites still running. Otherwise, you're cold calling investors. I tried to sell my shares in a startup to cover my six figure tax bill and couldn't find a buyer even with the company's CFO helping me.

In this case, the company had gone public, so they could have sold. Bolt is a wholly different story. I think the employees back in 2000 had one window where they could sell where the stock was at a high value. Many of them passed it up, expecting it to go to 70.

In 2015, I talked to ESO fund for some fintech options I had where I couldn’t cover the tax when I quit (stock wasn’t public). I was very satisfied with my dealings with them. Ultimately, they pulled out on the deal. That was a pretty strong signal because, low and behold, that pre-ipo stock tanked in a month too. Luckily, the lessons I’d learned from the earlier stories helped me to walk away from those options. It was a tough, but ultimately good decision.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#336

Post by scarface74 »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #321
scarface74 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the VCs nor the founders care about “sustainability” or profitability. They care about exiting and not being left holding the bag.

In the grand scheme of it, I haven't worked with that many, but every founder I have had the chance to work with has cared about sustainability. This is way more speculative, but I believe that sustainability goes out the window in favor of quarterly wins when the (co)founder steps back from their role and they transition to a non-(co)founder CEO and such. I guess we could interpret that as the cofounder cares about…

Once the founder takes VC funding, it no longer matters what the founder wants even if that is true.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#337

Post by dehrmann »

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.

Others have mentioned scale.

The other thing Uber has to do is optimize well. It needs to state competitive with Lyft for both passengers and drivers, minimize driver churn (but not too much), optimize matching, and charge predicted fares accurately.

Uber also processes an insane number of transactions. Not quite Visa, but I'd guess it's in the top 5% of volume as a merchant.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#338

Post by scarface74 »

beambot wrote: post #115
scarface74 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never cease to be amazed at how people value companies based on revenue and not profit. Revenue without profit numbers tell you nothing about how well the company is doing.

To do a proper net-present value calculation, you need more than just revenue & profit. You also want to know growth rate, gross margin, and capital efficiency.

If a company doesn’t survive and is not profitable, there is no net present value calculation.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#339

Post by arturkane7 »

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?

Wow that is very impressive in this climate may I ask what is the category of the business? I am guessing it is not in any of the fashionable current spaces (blockchain, retail logistics, fintech,…)

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#340

Post by semanticist »

alberth wrote: post #303
abraxas wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

~$20M in revenue from ~50 employees, equating to $400k in revenue/employee is extremely impressive for an early stage company. What company is that?

My employer was doing those kind of numbers pre-covid, having been profitable from year one.

But we’re not really ‘a tech company’, except in as much as we have a website. We did outlast companies in our sector that expanded like startups, though.

Staying relatively small and focussed with growth driven by making money instead of outside investment might be the antithesis of what a lot of people on here are into, but it can produce better results in many occasions.

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