Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. Why would you claim this?
throwaabolt changed the profile after the GP was posted. We've banned the account now, as well as what looks like their main account.
Huh! What a weird way to troll
Bolt announces layoffs
541–550 of 564 posts
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#542Bolt 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
Small note on the Bolt that's doing fine, I suspect a big part of why they're doing fine is that they're doing a lot more than just car sharing. Last I checked, they offer car sharing (car rentals), taxi service (think Uber), food delivery, scooter rental, and I'm sure there's other things in their basket. In many markets their taxi drivers do food delivery during slow hours, cars are moved into the rental part of the business when the taxi business doesn't need as many of them etc. It's a surprisingly well run business for a startup, honestly.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I didn't mean to be so absolutist. Excel is often enough. I've worked with companies who are trying to ditch their Excel sheets but, in my experience, it's often a super hard problem to solve, especially if you are trying to generalize to sell it to multiple parties.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ya, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean to say it's that easy to find them, but there are a bunch of them out there.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#545Earlier 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…
"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 Amaz…
mittelstands!
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The standards of living are high only because of the natural bounty of the Bay Area. Pretty good weather, stunning natural beauty with easy access to plentiful and varied open spaces, some of the best produce in the nation thanks to the most fertile and productive farmland in the world (central valley), multicultural, and generally tolerant and respectful people.
But many of the objective things that count towards a high standard of living are not much better than the rest of the nation, given the eye-watering tax burdens on CA residents. California roads are amongst the worst, housing quality is generally poor and nothing to write home about, failure to promote dense housing has led to encroachment on wooded areas that are huge fire risks, zero investment in burying power lines has exacerbated forest fires even further, and heavy property crime due to the exploding homeless population in core urban areas is continuously threatening public safety. Not to mention the insanely high gas prices (due to CA taxes), consumption taxes and effectively high property taxes which all hit living standards of average people quite hard.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#547Earlier 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.
Normaly me neither. In that particular case so it makes sense. Hardware development costs tons of money, especially when done by throwing highly paid engineers at the problem as the only idea. And when it is easier to get funding through a listing, but not enough yet, the company doesn't have a product yet but is public. Not an ideal place to be, for sure.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delaying profits is a perfectly valid strategy, but that implies intent. I guess however most of these modern startups are having no profits because they aren't managing to make them, and not as part of a bigger strategy.
Exactly. Delaying profits means having a knob in your cash allocation (usually sales) that you can turn down and become profitable. If you turn it down and still can't fund the company... you weren't delaying profits.
Pre-profit doesn't just refer to your cash-allocation-adjustment scenario. There's also the broader notion of what you focus on. A company may be pre-profit because they're not prioritizing profitability as a strategic objective early on. They may have no (current) way of turning a dial and becoming profitable, yet still be making the correct strategic decision to ignore profitability for the sake of e.g. growth or product development. Countless now-gigantic, now-profitable companies started as startups who were intentionally (and correctly) focusing on strategic objectives other than profitability.
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#549I called it ages ago -- this company is an utter train wreck. I am honestly ashamed of the entire industry for birthing and fostering this basically fraudulent company. Its mistakes and lies are compounding on themselves, creating awful outcomes for its employees: - Company almost certainly juiced its usage numbers, potentially by buying users to inflate its customers revenues, so it could use those numbers to convin…
wouldn't Fast be the Theranos even by your description? Bolt definitely has some explaining todo with employee stock options but calling it Theranos seems little extreme.
That seems right.
Bolt : WeWork :: Fast : Theranos
Re: Bolt announces layoffs
#550The funny thing about recessions, and macroeconomics as a whole; much of the time, we eat the food we cook. If there is an upcoming recession, the most likely root cause is that a bunch of people believed there will be an upcoming recession.
That's the convenient mythology. De facto - bear in mind the system that we´re talking about moves rather slowly - recessions always have real financial or economic system causes, and quite often are seen coming in advance by some people. People who are at the right points in the financial system, who for example can see bad debt starting to build up (takes months, but there's always a clear pattern of people startin…
Sure; but 8 times out of 10, these things happen and there's no recession. People were SCREAMING recession recession recession in 2020 Q1-Q2. It never materialized.
You've got the "well we kicked the can down the road" group, who are just as bad as the "predict 10 recessions and you'll get one right" group because there's always going to be a recession; saying "it'll happen in the future" is at least more accurate than saying "it'll happen last month, no this month, no next month, ok JULY" because at least you're not wrong, but the future is indefinite. Its not useful.
If the markets & macroeconomies were rational, then you could draw a line and say: root systemic issue causes recession. Clean, simple. The problem is, economies aren't rational (by any definition of rationality understandable to the human brain, which is the only useful definition). They're extremely complex, billions of signals, and predicting what's going to happen is extremely difficult.
Its honestly surprising to me that, generally, people on HN fully understand: you can't predict when the stock market is going to go up. It is literally no different than predicting when its going to go down. You can't do either; not with any foolproof reasoning. If you spend every month saying "its going to be a down month", eventually you'll be right, but it doesn't mean your process is good and it doesn't mean you'll be right next month.
"companies starting to run out of runway with no revenue coming in" Like Bolt? The company that raised $300M this year, and to compensate for their "declining runway" decides to fire... 250 people.
This is not an example of a company reacting to systemic market conditions. Its a company reacting to systemic market sentiment. Sentiment precedes conditions. Startups operate for years with 12 months of runway and no revenue. What's changed? Availability of capital? Eh, not really. What's changed is the expectation of availability of capital in 12 months. That expectation is based on real or semi-real things: rising interest rates, inflation, supply chain woes, but it is not in-and-of-itself Real; its a prediction of the future.
Of course, maybe availability of capital is drying up, today. Why? VCs being more stingy. Why? Well, maybe you say rising interest rates, maybe inflation, war in ukraine, but go talk with a VC and they'll say: expectation of market downturn in the coming year.
Through that expectation they (hopefully temporarily) destroyed the economic activity of 250 people. A hold has been placed on all those peoples' ability to: buy iPhones, buy clothes, eat at a nice restaurant, buy a house... and that is what causes recessions.
Sentiment precedes conditions. Sentiment is already priced in.