The founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt at an ~11B valuation when they only did $5.2M in Q1…
Talk about turning your employees into bagholders.
Bolt announces layoffs
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Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when they only did $5.2M in Q1… This is insane to me. I work at a startup with a similar valuation and we bring in almost double that amount of revenue a week... and I think we're overvalued.
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.
I don't think that's always true. If you are in that company, they almost certainly have exposure to the cost of those sales and the rate of sales growth, but also the cost to support more users. That gives you a good sense.
If you service has complexity and needs lots of hand-holding and is expensive to generate the sales, then it's harder to say what to do with sales numbers.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#43The founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt at an ~11B valuation when they only did $5.2M in Q1…
> founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt Do we have evidence to this encouragement?
The literal entire twitter thread where he was bragging about it and how great it was for "his employees".
There is basically no way to read that thread where it doesn't sound like an encouragement.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#44The founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt at an ~11B valuation when they only did $5.2M in Q1…
> founder also encouraged employees to take on what was effectively personal debt Do we have evidence to this encouragement?
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#45The wording of these always makes my skin crawl. Just say what's happening and what led to this decision. Numbers, not handwaivey rhetoric like "we need to focus".
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#46I tried to order a Solo Stove last fall. I placed the order, they accepted it, everything seemed like a normal e-commerce experience. Two days later, I received an email saying my order had been canceled for suspected fraud. I've never had that happen before, and it hasn't happened since. My experience is obviously anecdotal but their fraud detection routine clearly had major flaws.
With news of layoffs at Bolt, I wonder how many partners lost sales like mine.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#47Generous severance is the ethical test of a CEO during a layoff. It softens the blow of a layoff immeasurably to provide 4-6 months of severance.
If a CEO won't do it, the remaining employees should question the CEOs ethics, and ask themselves how they will be treated in the future. And if the business literally can't afford to do it (which is rare), then everyone should question the CEO's competence.
As customers, we should all do our best to avoid and boycott companies that do layoffs without providing generous severance. Because who wants to do business with an unethical or incompetent company.
If anyone knows what severance Bolt is paying, let us know.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#48First 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…
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Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#49Rumors 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
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#50I was in the middle of an interview loop with Bolt mid-Apr, they canceled my onsite so they could (supposedly) prioritize onboarding people they'd already hired. Dodged a bullet there. Also did calls with Coinbase, Uber, and Twitter, who all now have hiring freezes. Boggles my mind how companies flip on a dime between "hire as fast as possible" and "the sky is falling, we're laying people off." In the case of Bolt an…
Conversely: "Slow to hire, fast to fire" is something I've heard a few times in my career, and usually within organizations that turned out to be truly toxic and absolutely burnout inducing places to work.
Operating on either extreme probably makes for captivating blog posts and "leadership reading material" but in praxis seems like it should be self-evidently a bad idea.