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Bolt announces layoffs

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Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#531

Post by Kon-Peki »

sodapopcan wrote: post #395
bluedevilzn wrote: post #382

Earlier 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…

As a counterpoint, a few months ago I helped out a small manufacturing company with their Excel overload. Every day, they start with a new document based on a template someone made years ago. Every shift has their own worksheet in the document, every machine and job has its own set of rows, with lots of columns for capturing relevant information.

Everyone there is used to dealing with it and for every use case except this particular one, it does what they need.

All I did was write a little program to consolidate data from many thousands of spreadsheets, do some aggregations, etc. allowing them to get better insight into scrap and downtime rates per machine and per contract.

I charged $500 for about 1.5 hours of work, and they were thrilled.

Anyway, what I wanted to point out was that totally eliminating Excel is, for many businesses, probably not worth the hassle and productivity problems associated with the switch. But you certainly can move complexity out of Excel and into a place where it is much more manageable. Reading/writing Excel files is ridiculously easy and doesn't need to occur on a machine with Office, or even Windows.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#532

Post by hef19898 »

ETHisso2017 wrote: post #494
hef19898 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rivian?

Close enough!

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#533

Post by scarface74 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #526
scarface74 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Survival has more to do with cash flow than with profit.

I realize that I should have been more precise. I was talking about profit in the colloquial sense where profit = revenues - cost and not the GAAP meaning.

For instance, even when Amazon was “losing money” for years, they were using cash flow to expand. If they were running short of money, they could have just stopped building infrastructure. They had marginal profit unlike companies that are losing money on each sell.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#534

Post by ProAm »

silax wrote: post #148
ProAm wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

Employees can move on at their choosing no? And the investors made a gamble, it's their own fault if they invested poorly. Now they have to wait (or at least play to the contract).

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#535

Post by leaflets2 »

Lapz wrote: post #2

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…

About how much debt might that be about? Ballpark? Maybe between $4k - $40k if I were to guess?

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#536

Post by icelancer »

lkrubner wrote: post #441
icelancer wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At its peak during the 1980s and 1990s this is exactly what Inc magazine focused on, businesses making between $10 million and $100 million, the vast middle section of American business, the tens of thousands of medium sized businesses that make up the bulk of the economy. And Inc was very popular, because at that time it was a very popular idea for an entrepreneur to build a business on that scale. After 2000 that p…

>> As such, the middle zone of American business is under pressure. Much more now than before 2000, a business has to get big, or get bought, or go under. So the dream that Inc magazine was selling in the 1980s and 1990s simply isn't realistic any more.

I guess. Our HQ is in an industrial-commercial zone, and there are no shortage of small businesses making $1-100MM doing stuff I've never heard of, have probably existed for decades, and just do quite well for themselves. I've driven around 5-10 square miles over the last few years around here just to take inventory of said businesses, and so many of them don't have websites or meaningful online presence, yet clearly do decently well.

I think people just don't talk about these businesses, or care very much. Only Mike Rowe really seems to care about small business / blue collar-type work (Dirty Jobs). I guess Guy Fieri does a good job of highlighting restaurants in his work, too.

Kinda sad.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#537

Post by icelancer »

specialist wrote: post #517
lkrubner wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At its peak during the 1980s and 1990s this is exactly what Inc magazine focused on, businesses making between $10 million and $100 million, the vast middle section of American business, the tens of thousands of medium sized businesses that make up the bulk of the economy. And Inc was very popular, because at that time it was a very popular idea for an entrepreneur to build a business on that scale. After 2000 that p…

I'd like to see a Gini coefficient type analysis for businesses. Knowing nothing about nothing, I wonder about the role of financialization and tax policy in driving this transition. Stuff like the preference for growth stocks over value stocks, replacing pensions with individual retirement accounts, and cutting capital gains taxes. However we got here, my belief (hope) is our economies would be more resilient with m…

Tax rates on small businesses - especially in my county/state combination - are absolutely brutal and have significantly gone up over time in comparison to larger businesses as a percentage of revenue. There's a lot of reasons for this, none of which I think are deliberately intended to harm small businesses, to be clear, but it's frustrating all the same.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#538

Post by icelancer »

moneywoes wrote: post #418
icelancer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bolt pitched us a ton (we do eight figures of revenue online using a WP-style checkout), we heard them out, did a small demo-type, and I spoke to a bunch of their customers... and we came to similar conclusions. It's overhyped "technology" that has very questionable marketing claims.

Has your team run into any issues with WP checkout?

Of course. Everything sucks. But people keep buying stuff and we incrementally improve the experience, so it is what it is.

Our marketing team wanted to move everything to Shopify, and then I asked them to do a cost-benefit analysis compared to the 0% we pay with our current setup (plus Stripe fees).

When the estimate came back in the hundreds of thousands of dollars more per year, I took the opportunity to lecture them on rent-seeking and middleman evaporation of profits that these software startups/businesses capture silently from organizations who just don't do the math.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#539

Post by snotrockets »

ta988 wrote: post #352
snotrockets wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$300 won't cover the cost for a qualified advisor. Even if you'd get a tax professional to make the math for you for that money (the one I use charges $350 for a phone call, ymmv), getting a lawyer to go over the terms of the loan would be $1000 at minimum.

That's when you start an informal union with your colleagues, pool the $300 and get a real advice.

Better yet, start a formal union, and hold managment accountable for such sh*t.

Re: Bolt announces layoffs

#540

Post by lighttower »

kareemm wrote: post #514
hef19898 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Being at now-puplic start-up that needs somewhere north of, IMHO, 500 million to become somewhat profitable Maybe it’s just me. But I don’t consider publicly traded companies to be anywhere near a startup.

Boom supersonic?
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