(Ex-)Convoy engineer here. No mystery as to why this happened, sudden tight market and low available capital demolished us. External reasons given in the article were the same we knew and couldn't do anything about considering that none of the M&A options materialized. Detailed the shutdown on a call at 8:30am Pacific this morning. CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare. Lot of talented folks in Seattle and…
Absolutely terrible. Tiny companies NOT backed by some of the richest men in the world give more when they wind down.
> CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare. That should be illegal. How much are the executives making from this? I'm really sorry you're in the middle of this. I hope you can find a better job soon.
What makes you think the executives are making anything from this? It's a startup, it ran out of money, it failed, there is nothing left. Joining a startup is risky.
What makes you think the executives are making anything from this? It's a startup, it ran out of money, it failed, there is nothing left. Joining a startup is risky.
Because the executives (almost) always make sure that they are compensated before the fall.
start-up idea if anyone is bored: disrupt car shipping. When I moved from Seattle to Raleigh shipping my car was BY FAR the biggest headache. It's a 20th century business where you have to call people, who will bid for you, and you have no idea if your bid is accepted. Agents will promise a low price to get your business, then tell you a week later that bid was too low, you need to double it. I eventually just gave u…
Isn’t this uship? You place anything you need shipped on there and various shippers can bid without having to go through a broker.
Pretty much, yeah. And from my personal experience, uship is useless. Lots of independent people that charge too much due to small economies of scale (one guy with a goose-neck truck vs. a car carrier). The few times I've had to ship a vehicle cross country I've wasted time on uship before going back to a traditional broker and letting them handle it for less money and less hassle. It's still annoying dealing with the salespeople, but if you're good at playing that game you can at least use the usual negotiation tactics to get an even lower price.
How can there be no healthcare without a bankruptcy filing? Isn't COBRA mandatory?
C̶O̶B̶R̶A̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶d̶a̶t̶o̶r̶y̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶a̶i̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶a̶y̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶i̶t̶ …if the company still exists (see comments above and below)
>CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare. Classy. Learning a lot about how certain people treat their employees during these last couple of admittedly insane years. Good for future reference, I guess - though not much solace now. I feel for the employees. Edit: Wow, more responses than I thought! I admit that the tone of my comment was too reactionary, but my opinion stands. I won't modify the original commen…
Ex-Convoy employee here: if a company is shutting down, it obviously can't provide severance. It's not a matter of class or not.
If things are dire enough to close up shop now, they probably were dire enough to close up shop 2 months ago, and you can use the cash to give your employees some runway for finding new employment.
start-up idea if anyone is bored: disrupt car shipping. When I moved from Seattle to Raleigh shipping my car was BY FAR the biggest headache. It's a 20th century business where you have to call people, who will bid for you, and you have no idea if your bid is accepted. Agents will promise a low price to get your business, then tell you a week later that bid was too low, you need to double it. I eventually just gave u…
Businesses like these are hard to "disrupt" because despite all the fancy websites and apps, pricing algorithms, scheduling, reminders, live video feeds and whatever else you can build, underneath it all the success or failure still depends on some guy showing up at your house, picking up your car and trucking it across the country. Unless you can automate that part nothing will fundamentally change.
It goes deeper than that. Even after all the sophisticated systems and automation, a huge amount of logistics is still email-driven, and it seems next to impossible to get account managers, carriers and customers past that.
>CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare. Classy. Learning a lot about how certain people treat their employees during these last couple of admittedly insane years. Good for future reference, I guess - though not much solace now. I feel for the employees. Edit: Wow, more responses than I thought! I admit that the tone of my comment was too reactionary, but my opinion stands. I won't modify the original commen…
Isn’t this standard for startups that shutdown?
total shutdowns are rare, though. Usually someone wants the IP
The company is shutting down because they ran out of money... where do you think this magical severance pay is going to come from?
Good management manages the treasury so those funds are available during a wind down. If you run out of runway and the bank account is empty, with nothing to provide workers who are getting term'd, you fucked up. (have co-owned a business where we made folks whole for pay the owner skipped out on during the failure, asset acquisition, and their onboarding with us; plan ahead and you can do the right thing, fail to pl…
OTOH, I worked for a very small company during dot-bomb that cut salaries and the principals took no pay for a bit but came out the other side--for a decent number of years. Not sure I'd have been better off had they done a "Whelp. We did our best" a few months earlier. As you get larger, decisions obviously have longer runways.