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In my opinion, Medium has a problem - It's not really a product that is supposed to make a LOT of revenue (for it's size). In all honesty, it's very easy to te

In my opinion, Medium has a problem - It's not really a product that is supposed to make a LOT of revenue (for it's size). In all honesty, it's very easy to technically build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business (not a crazy growth startup) that can generate revenue and most importantly be sustainable. As for generating revenue: it's very easy to charge people a few $ / m for stuff I'd consider extra features (premium themes and custom domains). It's sad those 50 people lost jobs (I feel for them - I had lost my previous job when a startup decided to downsize), but in all honesty - what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]? [0] - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity

the_duke 10y ago
Well, 6 years in business, offices in NY, DC and SF (all expensive locations), 3 company acquisitions, salaries for 100+ employees. I can see them getting to 120 million easily. Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question...
- hk__2 10y ago
  > Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    What these unrelated services did doesn't refute the point that a small team can put together a blogging service. Most components you need even already exist as pre-packaged FOSS. On top of it, one company on your list had a complex product that was built by a hand-full of college students in its early days. The Instagram company they bought also had just 13 employees.
  - sfilargi 10y ago
    > Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number. While true, this doesn't really answer the GP's question, does it?
  - idlewords 10y ago
    Twitter is another horribly overstaffed example. The Ev Williams signature touch.
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    for the first two, they are dealing with tons of data on people's interests, machine learning, spam algorithms, search infrastructure, not just the pageviews. the only hard technical part of Medium is perhaps their content recommendations, but thats it. dealing with a ton of pageviews is hard, yes but nowhere near the complexity of dealing with what others are doing. you can solve that problem with more machines and money if need be. hard problems (ie google search) can only be solved with PHDs and thinking.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jyriand 10y ago
  I think you are assuming that all of those 150 people are engineers. I guess most of them are not. You can build this blog platform with 10-15 engineers, but you also need people who will manage and sell.
  - Dr0Dre 10y ago
    Genuine question: manage and sell what?. Medium doesn't serve customer with products, it's ads only and I don't think that would require massive workforce to buy/sell them.
falloutx 10y ago
Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model. Its due to a deeply embedded business philosophy where CEOs and other business people try to create bigger companies, and not necessarily better companies. Sometimes they are able to trigger a mushroom growth, but most of the times they fail. But due to survivor bias, they create a few more wannabe CEOs who again trey to create bigger and not better companies, and the cycle repeats. Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices(which usually have about 1000+ employees). I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired. Even disheartening thing is that they might have already dried up most of their cash, and still don't know how to run a business. Executives are currently playing a dangerous game of "Let's see if we can raise more" and "We'll think of something".
- bdcravens 10y ago
  > Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model. Isn't it worth considering that those 50 employees should have never been hired, but only were due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nkozyra 10y ago
    Sure, but it seems excessive to blame them twice ;)
  - itsdrewmiller 10y ago
    Those aren't mutually exclusive - Medium overhired but it is sad for the people who didn't make that decision but lost their job because of it.
  - brongondwana 10y ago
bluedino 10y ago
>> build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business I'm guessing they have a lot more than 5 reviewers, writers, editors...
- andygates 10y ago
  What is the editorial situation? I've not been paying close attention, but they seem to have gone from curated long-form content to Yet Another Blogging Site.
rco8786 10y ago
I always find it amusing when people say "I could run XYZ with a 10th of the engineers, easy!", as if they have any actual insight into the engineering backends that run these services. I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until recently) to name a few.
  - rco8786 10y ago
    Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to have over 1,000 employees? There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.
    - melvinmt 10y ago
      Instagram had around ~50 million users and 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook.
      - sulam 10y ago
        Probably not the best example since the rumor was they were all constantly paged. But yeah, some sites don't require much engineering horsepower.
        stevens32 10y ago
        What do you mean by constantly paged?
        mynegation 10y ago
Justsignedup 10y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head with startups. Overinflated growth and expectations. If you make a platform and expect limitless growth then a lot of doors close. If medium was good enough with 15 employees, why make a good thing bad? Why is 15 people having a highly profitable sustained business seen as a bad thing today? If that is the limit, then keep that company slowly growing to 30 people over time if it becomes necessary. But then again if you race to investor money and immediately have to make $1 billion to appease investors, it suddenly makes sense.
flylib 10y ago
Medium still has years of runway...
- scott_karana 10y ago
  Not if the same people who hired 50+ extra engineers are still steering the ship the same way...
yuhong 10y ago
I posted this Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249166
intoverflow2 10y ago
> what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]? Interesting people freaking out about this when if you point out the bloat at Twitter (which dwarfs Medium many times over and goes years without shipping anything user facing) HN posters will jump to defend it just because they have a few dev centric open source projects that are widely used.

the_duke 10y ago

Well, 6 years in business, offices in NY, DC and SF (all expensive locations), 3 company acquisitions, salaries for 100+ employees. I can see them getting to 120 million easily. Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question...

hk__2 10y ago
> Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  What these unrelated services did doesn't refute the point that a small team can put together a blogging service. Most components you need even already exist as pre-packaged FOSS. On top of it, one company on your list had a complex product that was built by a hand-full of college students in its early days. The Instagram company they bought also had just 13 employees.
- sfilargi 10y ago
  > Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number. While true, this doesn't really answer the GP's question, does it?
- idlewords 10y ago
  Twitter is another horribly overstaffed example. The Ev Williams signature touch.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  for the first two, they are dealing with tons of data on people's interests, machine learning, spam algorithms, search infrastructure, not just the pageviews. the only hard technical part of Medium is perhaps their content recommendations, but thats it. dealing with a ton of pageviews is hard, yes but nowhere near the complexity of dealing with what others are doing. you can solve that problem with more machines and money if need be. hard problems (ie google search) can only be solved with PHDs and thinking.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jyriand 10y ago
I think you are assuming that all of those 150 people are engineers. I guess most of them are not. You can build this blog platform with 10-15 engineers, but you also need people who will manage and sell.
- Dr0Dre 10y ago
  Genuine question: manage and sell what?. Medium doesn't serve customer with products, it's ads only and I don't think that would require massive workforce to buy/sell them.

falloutx 10y ago

Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model. Its due to a deeply embedded business philosophy where CEOs and other business people try to create bigger companies, and not necessarily better companies. Sometimes they are able to trigger a mushroom growth, but most of the times they fail. But due to survivor bias, they create a few more wannabe CEOs who again trey to create bigger and not better companies, and the cycle repeats. Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices(which usually have about 1000+ employees). I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired. Even disheartening thing is that they might have already dried up most of their cash, and still don't know how to run a business. Executives are currently playing a dangerous game of "Let's see if we can raise more" and "We'll think of something".

bdcravens 10y ago
> Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model. Isn't it worth considering that those 50 employees should have never been hired, but only were due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nkozyra 10y ago
  Sure, but it seems excessive to blame them twice ;)
- itsdrewmiller 10y ago
  Those aren't mutually exclusive - Medium overhired but it is sad for the people who didn't make that decision but lost their job because of it.
- brongondwana 10y ago

bluedino 10y ago

>> build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business I'm guessing they have a lot more than 5 reviewers, writers, editors...

andygates 10y ago
What is the editorial situation? I've not been paying close attention, but they seem to have gone from curated long-form content to Yet Another Blogging Site.

rco8786 10y ago

I always find it amusing when people say "I could run XYZ with a 10th of the engineers, easy!", as if they have any actual insight into the engineering backends that run these services. I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.

nateberkopec 10y ago
That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until recently) to name a few.
- rco8786 10y ago
  Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to have over 1,000 employees? There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.
  - melvinmt 10y ago
    Instagram had around ~50 million users and 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook.
    - sulam 10y ago
      Probably not the best example since the rumor was they were all constantly paged. But yeah, some sites don't require much engineering horsepower.
      - stevens32 10y ago
        What do you mean by constantly paged?
        mynegation 10y ago

Justsignedup 10y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head with startups. Overinflated growth and expectations. If you make a platform and expect limitless growth then a lot of doors close. If medium was good enough with 15 employees, why make a good thing bad? Why is 15 people having a highly profitable sustained business seen as a bad thing today? If that is the limit, then keep that company slowly growing to 30 people over time if it becomes necessary. But then again if you race to investor money and immediately have to make $1 billion to appease investors, it suddenly makes sense.

flylib 10y ago

Medium still has years of runway...

scott_karana 10y ago
Not if the same people who hired 50+ extra engineers are still steering the ship the same way...

yuhong 10y ago

I posted this Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249166

intoverflow2 10y ago

> what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]? Interesting people freaking out about this when if you point out the bloat at Twitter (which dwarfs Medium many times over and goes years without shipping anything user facing) HN posters will jump to defend it just because they have a few dev centric open source projects that are widely used.