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WhatsApp had 55 employees and I'd say it had no marketing to speak of.
by fasj82 8y ago
WhatsApp had 55 employees and I'd say it had no marketing to speak of.
- sanderjd 8y ago55 * $100,000 is already $5.5 million. Revenue of $10M/year seems pretty tight to me, for a 55 person company.
- paxy 8y agoReal costs per employee are 2-3x the salary anyways.
- kbenson 8y agoI find that hard to swallow for a small company size, such as being discussed here. Do you have a reference or some reasoning to support this? I'm interested to know where it comes from.
- ghaff 8y agoBenefits, office space, equipment, T&E, employment taxes, etc. This is an old article but it suggests about 2.7x. [1] I agree that it might be less for a startup assuming a frugal startup but it's probably at least 2x salary on average. [1] http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-... (This is old but nothing really substantial has changed except.)
- michaelt 8y agoI'm not sure a ratio-to-salary is the best tool here. I mean, why would a developer on $150,000 have twice the healthcare cost, or office space cost, or equipment cost of one on $75,000?
- ghaff 8y agoIt’s just a rule of thumb and some costs do roughly scale. I’m sure there are more sophisticated calculators and spreadsheets for this sort of thing.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI'm assuming you don't run a business. 2-3x sounds in the right ballpark to me.
- wolco 8y agoWhy is everyone making 100,000?
- sanderjd 8y agoThat is a very conservative mean all-in cost per employee for a group of professionals. Edit to add: in the US that is.
- ghaff 8y agoYes. That implies the average salary is almost certainly <$50K and maybe more like $35-40K.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoBecause they are developers?
- arcticfox 8y agoDevelopers would cost way more than that, especially if you factor in taxes.
- kbenson 8y agoNot to mention the video someone posted beloew from an engineer talking about Erlang there in 2014 has some interesting numbers. Christmas/New years is peak, and on Christmas Eve they were maxing out at 146GB/s out. If we assume they maybe averages 75% of that over 6 hours, that's 146Gb/s * (60606)s / 8bytes/byte * 0.75 * 0.05dolars/GB = $14,782.50 for a 6 hour period (estimate). That's highest listed bandwidth tier price for Azure, I'm sure they would pay less for a number of reasons. But let's just say that $10k for a whole day may not be out of the realm of possibility. That puts bandwidth costs possibly North of $3 million a year. Even at $1 million, that's a lot of money.
- MichaelGG 8y agoOk but a serious company wouldn't pay per byte if they were trying to save money. They could buy that much connectivity for like 50k a month. (Though they'd need to get some switches and have a network engineer.) And if that's audio/video Vs just text, clever NAT hole punching techniques could reduce it if truly needed. But, it seems WhatsApp was on SoftLayer? In that case their costs might have been vastly higher.