...and their site says "We're Hiring"
Bolt announces layoffs
431–440 of 564 posts
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#432One of the things that I would consider before joining any startups is just how good sane (or humane or whatever appropriate word) the founders are. Don't go behind all the PRs. Just try to find whether the people who founded are actually good people. What are their ethics. All these are subjective qualities so it's difficult to weigh but that's where the money is. edited (I understand I might not have described what…
How do you go about doing this exactly?
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Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way it seems like SWE jobs in tech hubs are subsidized by VCs. We can see it as some huge redistribution of wealth.
With an important caveat. The SWEs in the Bay Area are just conduits for obscene sums of money flowing from VCs to real-estate agents, landlords and homeowners. Plus car dealerships, perhaps (every other car is a Tesla or a higher-end BMW/Mercedes model in the Bay Area).
This is the correct interpretation. All those high salaries are high to cover high standards of living and high prices.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you even go about going to a factory and convincing people that they need a certain piece of software? Did you work in this space and already have connections?
I'm butting in here because this struck a chord. There are lots of people of people out there running highly profitable (and globally well-known) businesses off of Excel sheets. They have identified that they don't want to do this anymore as these sheets have grown so monstrously complex over the years that the employees who have to use them are miserable. Basically there is lots of opportunity to start a tech compan…
It's not easy to find those excel users and ask them what they need.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Business will continue, they are just trimming fat (excessively) based on what the market is doing. Next 2 years might be rough, especially for ecommerce.
In general, I agree. But for Bolt in particular- they have a 2500x ARR multiple, and their top customer is suing them for "utterly failing to deliver on its promises" due to incompetence in software and lying about the details of their relationship, and the general sentiment of the company and founder is that of fraud, and the direct competitor just went out of business for very similar reasons, and the TAM of the ma…
Revenue looked on track for $20M ARR with no growth. About 500x at an $11B val.
But I think they raised about $1.3B, so if they recap at about that amount plus an employee pool, they can bring that multiple to 50x. This would wipe out the founders and early employees, leaving current employees some incentive to move forward.
Then, if the team can grow the business 2x, you are in normal-ish SAAS multiples. So it's not crazy. It could still work. A lot of pain.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#436Earlier 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?
I worked at a startup and the CEO was obsessed with hiring at all cost. We, engineers, were all wondering what the hell these new hires were supposed to do. We did not need them. Then they explained it to me. They needed to show growth through hiring in order to raise money. I mean, I couldn’t even blame them, if that’s a criteria for VC to hand you a check, well you gotta do what you gotta do. Needless to say this s…
That's the equivalent of counting the number of lines of code to see how much work you did that day as a developer.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#437If they will fire 50%, will they expect that the remaining 50% will do the work of 100%?
Can employees go on strike to prevent the layoffs?
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#438Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#439Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#440Earlier 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?
Yeah Bolt's numbers are just nonsense. We do 1/3 of what you do with a slightly less workforce than you, same hiring strategy. There have to be tons of businesses like ours. No one cares about small business success though. I'd love to read more books and stories about "small" businesses making $5-40MM and how they go about their day and running the company. Would make for far better reading than all the vaporware an…
"Hidden Champions", it is not super recent, but it deals with mostly what you are looking for.
The thesis is (If I remember correctly) that the backbone of Germanys economy are "Hidden Champions", small but highly skilled and specialized companies that can produce a niche (technical) good at an quality that cannot be matched by any other mean, making them practical the entire market for that thing.
- The book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Champions-Twenty-First-Century...
- Wikipedia even has an article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions