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> In January 2022, Bolt raised €628 million from investors led by Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management and Research Co, taking the company's valuation to €7.4 billion
With YC, Craft, and Sequoia all urging their portfolio companies to operate at a When you’re small, and have revenue, it might only take a handful of layoffs to get to “default alive” as a startup. But once you go beyond a series A and start dumping gasoline on every part of your business to scale faster, the risk starts to grow exponentially. These companies with hundreds of employees are insanely inefficient, but t…
What do you mean by <2x burn multiple ?
I guess net burn = net loss?
Bolt Financial, the finops company, not Bolt the car sharing service which seems to be doing fine: > In January 2022, Bolt raised €628 million from investors led by Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management and Research Co, taking the company's valuation to €7.4 billion
I'm a bit naive on this space so forgive if this is an ignorant question; Can anyone explain how any of these companies (Bolt, Fast, 1o) are doing anything different than "checkout with paypal"? What exactly is wrong with paypal that would make a merchant want to use Bolt instead?
The idea is that a central 1-click checkout provider will store your payment information, shipping address, and other details after the first time you use a site with their checkout. The next time you checkout on any website that uses the same 1-click checkout provider, they already have your information for “1-click” checkout. The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winn…
I also imagine more than a few shoppers would be freaked out by seeing their card details stored on a site they've never used.
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> The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winner-take-all market where every shop wants to use the 1-click provider with the largest customer base. Not saying you're wrong about that being the thesis, but the thesis makes no sense to me. It assumes that consumers are selecting shopping sites based on which payment service the sites use rather than on, say, price or select…
I've definitely bailed on purchases before due to the purchase flow being too annoying, and either found another site or gave up. Usually this is due to having to type in all my data just to figure out what shipping options are, but I'm quite sure every step you make people do to check out results in x% fewer sales.
“We have a huge drop-off rate in our checkout flow! Customers have intent to buy and they’re somehow getting blocked in checkout; we need a smoother/faster checkout…”
No dumbass, you need to need to not charge $15 shipping on a product where you’re only $5 cheaper than your free shipping competitor.
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
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.
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Maybe not a proxy per se, but more like a leading indicator, right? Those big enterprise customers might not ask about revenue, but the sales unit can certainly brag about headcount.
The moment that any indicator becomes a goal it instantly becomes completely useless as an indicator or metric for anything.
But of course revenue (and, having achieved that, then profit IMO) should be among the concrete goals. It’s so weird that this is missed so often.
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Curious, why? I could understand it as merchant, but as customer, PP has great customer protection (including partial chargebacks, free return shipping, etc.)
They’re notorious for freezing peoples accounts for no reason or recourse and generally being terrible to deal with.
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Toosh!
... I have to ask, is this some word I don't know, or is this a misspelling of 'touché'?
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Couldn't agree more! Being at now-puplic start-up that needs somewhere north of, IMHO, 500 million to become somewhat profitable (industry specific, some hardware products simply cost a shit ton of money to develop) that is something I think a lot about lately. Especially the, up until now, habbit of inefficiently thtowing money and people at a problem hoping something sticks. In hardware, so nothing that can be grow…
> habbit of inefficiently thtowing money and people at a problem I've repeatedly commented on this phenomenon. In my experience this has never worked and unlikely to work. I've seen at least 2-3 startups doing well go completely offtrack by sudden infusion of big VC money. They are then expected to ship features like no tomorrow which leads to rampant hiring. As a result salaries go through the roof messing up intern…