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Rumors going around on blind (posted by bolt employees) that over the course of a few rounds of layoffs it will be 30-50% of the total workforce. A lot of the i

Rumors going around on blind (posted by bolt employees) that over the course of a few rounds of layoffs it will be 30-50% of the total workforce. A lot of the initial layoff are software engineers. Apparently they only have 12-18 months of runway, and need to effectively double that. Current revenue is 40M. I guess this is the beginning of the tech washout. clings to large tech company job EDIT: 33% layoff today

nrmitchi 4y ago
1) "Multiple rounds" is basically the worst possible way to do layoffs. 2) Based on their recent fundraise (and assuming that they had 0 dollars at that point), that's basically a burn rate of 25-30M/m. I'm not sure I can event comprehend what that company could be spending that much money on.
- halfdan 4y ago
  Having 5000 employees will do that quickly.
  - nrmitchi 4y ago
    From what I'm seeing they had ~550 employees as of the beginning of this year (~4 months ago). This was up from ~270 in Sept 2021 (~4 months prior). I would find it very hard to believe they have increased their headcount by 900% (~4500 people) in 4 months.
  - datalopers 4y ago
    https://www.linkedin.com/company/bolt-com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bolt-com/ While not everyone has a linkedin, 900 employees seems like a reasonably safe pre-layyoffs estimate?
    - polote 4y ago
      Among the 900 a lot of them are drivers at the Bolt delivery company (So not the same one)
- urthor 4y ago
  Agreed. The way to do layoffs is simple. You get managers to stack rank the lot, then you get every single person with 30 or more reports under them in a room. Then you do the whole layoff in one 5 hour meeting. Swing the axe and get it done in 2 days.
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    I used to work “doing layoffs” and I don’t think I ever saw stack ranking as the layoff strategy. Most often I saw “divisions” or “capabilities” cut, either entirely or to skeleton crews that kept the lights on. Next was just randomly applied. And frankly managers with 30 or more reports were frequently layoff targets as they are expensive and don’t add a ton of obvious value to the bottom line (unless they had a sales function).
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Was always curious about that from an outcome perspective. It seemed like a company could go "manager-lean" (ax manager count, retain employees) for awhile, easier than vice versus. I'd imagine a lot of paperwork got back up, but presumably the company business roughly kept going. True or false?
      - kasey_junk 4y ago
        I think the overriding lesson I learned from my time doing that job was that people dramatically overestimate their value to a firm. That’s true of ninja rockstar developers and vp directors of business dev. Largely the world keeps turning no matter who leaves a firm no matter the circumstances.
        sgt101 4y ago
        There is a lot of confirmation bias in this observation. Frankly, the dead have no voices and the missing value and / or damage is often simply unobserved by those who are left. It's rare that the damage is surfaced. I did see an event once though when a fairly senior manager made repeated attempts to hand over some data collection and reporting when they were made redundant but were rebuffed by colleagues and their manager alike. Essentially this person was seen as a bit of a third wheel, and many comments were hurled around during the lay off process along the lines of "not clear what his real contribution is". Well, it turned out that the data that he was collecting, analysising and reporting on was fundamental to the running of a strategic investment. Some months after he left the said project tanked, and because the data was not available a lot of money that potentially should have been recoverable wasn't. So, it cuts both ways.
- dexterdog 4y ago
  Even a single round is bad because it will cause some of your most hire-able people to look and then likely leave. When a second round comes too close to the first then everybody starts looking hard and the people that stick around are the ones nobody else wants. It would be cheaper to just close the doors.
  - nrmitchi 4y ago
    If it’s known it’s a single round, it’s easier for everyone remaining to not look around. When a second round breaks that trust though, all bets are off.
    - laserlight 4y ago
      Leaving things to trust is not an option IMHO. Unless a company can guarantee that there won't be another round, they can always change their mind. I'm not sure if any company can give any such guarantee.
      - nrmitchi 4y ago
        That’s a bit disingenuous; of course no company can make a 100% guarantee. There is still a huge difference between “this is the only round of layoffs, we will grow past this” (when this is the true intent) and “that’s all for this week. We’ll be back with the next round of layoffs on Friday”
- rmk 4y ago
  In my experience, layoffs almost always happen in waves. The first layoff is usually when nonperformers and people who are already on managers' hit lists (people who are hard to fire only for legal reasons) are jettisoned. Later rounds start eating into actually valuable employees. In the interim, many experienced people read between the lines and make for the exits, further depleting the ranks and leaving behind folks who can not or will not look for opportunities elsewhere.
unicornmama 4y ago
Large technology companies won’t hesitate to layoff employees to protect their stock price.
- puranjay 4y ago
  Remember that debt fuelled stock buybacks were a huge reason for propping up stock prices for these companies as well. Now that cheap debt is off the table, that buyback strategy will have diminishing impact as well, forcing companies to find other ways to keep stock up (such as cutting costs)
  - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
    I don't think VC-backed startups typically do stock buybacks? That's more of a Fortune 500 thing, AFAIK. "Startups" (of whatever size) are always concerned about the next funding round; I don't think they're going to burn runway to prop up the share price. It's companies like GE and IBM that do that, AFAIK.
    - puranjay 4y ago
      I was referring to the OP’s comment that established publicly traded tech companies too will be under pressure to keep the stock price up and thus, aren’t immune to layoffs
      - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
        I see. You have a point there. That would cement, in my mind, their transition from "growth" to "utility" companies, though, and I would expect them to start paying dividends.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    I mean the established big tech companies are sitting on mountains of cash. I suspect they’ll start ramping up buybacks even more aggressively due to what they see as undervalued equity.
ushakov 4y ago
they raised $355M this year and like $600M last year https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5/company_finan... how can a company burn money that quickly so they end up with only 12-18 months of runway?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  No idea. Confirmed the layoff number is 33% as of today. Which is pretty aggressive, they must be hemorrhaging money.
- phphphphp 4y ago
  very broad strokes: money is raised to be spent. each round gets you to the next, or you reach some measure of sustainability before the money runs out — layoffs like this should be expected, regardless of the amount raised, if there’s a shift in conditions that indicate raising again in 18 months isn’t going to be easy. You can burn any amount of money if you want to.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Yes, regardless of Bolt's specific circumstances, this is on point. Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it. Especially for the really big raises, a big part of the motivation is that the company has made a case for how the large amount of money is going to be deployed very quickly (with the goal of generating returns). You don't take $900M of VC funding and stretch it out over 10 years, that's not what they gave it to you for. Whether it's actually possible to usefully deploy all that money is another matter. Generally it's very hard. I only have an up-close perspective on one such large raise (that ultimately failed) but imo the reason they got the money was that they made themselves a credible way to spend so much so quickly.
    - dev_tty01 4y ago
      >Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it. Depends on the economic environment. We are headed for a difficult cycle. Downsizing and doing a raise to at least partially "sit on" might be the best strategy at this moment. Money flow can go from huge to nothing faster than one might imagine.
throway782 4y ago
This is the deflating of the covid hype bubble used to distract the public, for sure. It will be 12-18 months at least before we can tell if a long legged tech washout is upon us.
truthwhisperer 4y ago
icelancer 4y ago
> Current revenue is 40M Last valuation of this company was $10+ billion. Absurd. [0] I'm personally happy to see the correction coming where profits - or lack thereof, more likely around these parts - actually means something these days. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/14/online-checkout-bolt-decacorn/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/14/online-checkout-bolt-decac...
adrr 4y ago
I heard they had 900 employees. It's just a checkout page that plugs into your payment processor. I don't get why they need so many people. Most complicated thing they are probably doing is tokenizing the credit card themselves so the card info is portable across merchants with different processor.
- tootie 4y ago
  I say the same about how Uber has thousands of engineers working on an app with 6 screens.
  - adrr 4y ago
    Uber has scale, they are processing $15+ billion plus in rides a year. Millions of customers and millions of drivers that need tools built to service them.
  - sebdufbeau 4y ago
    This link get's thrown around a lot, but here's a former Uber EM explaining why "an app with 6 screens" is misjudged statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
    - tootie 4y ago
      That adds up to maybe 100-200 people in my head. It's not like they rebuild every payment integration every day. I worked for a retailer with >$2B in revenue across stores and 5 websites plus internal tools and we had about 100. And probably half were low cost contractors. Software practices sucked, deploys took forever, they had an ivory tower architecture crew and pie in the sky CTO and yet their digital products all worked fine and made tons of money. Why? Their products and branding were excellent.
  - donthellbanme 4y ago
  - dehrmann 4y ago
abraxas 4y ago
40M in revenue for the year?! Jesus, my startup is making about half that with a good sales pipeline for this year and we are 55 employees total. We might hire additional handful this year but that's it. How do you even onboard when you double your workforce every few months?
- version_five 4y ago
  I've seen companies with less revenue and a bigger workforce growing at that rate. They call it blitz-scaling, and I don't know if it's actually ever worked, where I saw it first hand it was basically just setting a pile of money on fire.
  - thwarted 4y ago
    Yep, this is what happens when your "growth" metric is employee headcount, under the naïve assumption that more people is a proxy for more work getting done is a proxy for revenue. This may make more sense for a sales-focused organization, less so for marketing or technology driven organization.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      Maybe not a proxy per se, but more like a leading indicator, right? Those big enterprise customers might not ask about revenue, but the sales unit can certainly brag about headcount.
      - alexb_ 4y ago
        The moment that any indicator becomes a goal it instantly becomes completely useless as an indicator or metric for anything.
        doctor_eval 4y ago
        Absolutely agree. I wrote the comment while thinking, why would a company need a proxy for revenue, when revenue is so easy to count? On reflection I now understand the GP’s point; when revenue is zero, you need something to use instead. But of course revenue (and, having achieved that, then profit IMO) should be among the concrete goals. It’s so weird that this is missed so often.
mrcwinn 4y ago
Similar. It's wild to realize when I was CEO of our startup, we had significantly less name recognition, dramatically less capital raised (by orders of magnitude), a much smaller team. ...and yet apparently significantly more revenue per employee than Bolt. Oh, and we were profitable, infinite runway, good growth, solid unit economics, LTVs we understood. Imagine!
- whatever_dude 4y ago
  Everybody starts making zero (or negative) dollars. I have no positive view of Bolt myself, but in a situation like this VCs are putting money on future prospects/growth potential, not the early revenue. (Doesn't work if the company goes bust though)
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  Many CEOs and even investors care less about profits as long as the valuation is sky high. I think Yahoo was never profitable.

nrmitchi 4y ago

1) "Multiple rounds" is basically the worst possible way to do layoffs. 2) Based on their recent fundraise (and assuming that they had 0 dollars at that point), that's basically a burn rate of 25-30M/m. I'm not sure I can event comprehend what that company could be spending that much money on.

halfdan 4y ago
Having 5000 employees will do that quickly.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  From what I'm seeing they had ~550 employees as of the beginning of this year (~4 months ago). This was up from ~270 in Sept 2021 (~4 months prior). I would find it very hard to believe they have increased their headcount by 900% (~4500 people) in 4 months.
- datalopers 4y ago
  https://www.linkedin.com/company/bolt-com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bolt-com/ While not everyone has a linkedin, 900 employees seems like a reasonably safe pre-layyoffs estimate?
  - polote 4y ago
    Among the 900 a lot of them are drivers at the Bolt delivery company (So not the same one)
urthor 4y ago
Agreed. The way to do layoffs is simple. You get managers to stack rank the lot, then you get every single person with 30 or more reports under them in a room. Then you do the whole layoff in one 5 hour meeting. Swing the axe and get it done in 2 days.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  I used to work “doing layoffs” and I don’t think I ever saw stack ranking as the layoff strategy. Most often I saw “divisions” or “capabilities” cut, either entirely or to skeleton crews that kept the lights on. Next was just randomly applied. And frankly managers with 30 or more reports were frequently layoff targets as they are expensive and don’t add a ton of obvious value to the bottom line (unless they had a sales function).
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Was always curious about that from an outcome perspective. It seemed like a company could go "manager-lean" (ax manager count, retain employees) for awhile, easier than vice versus. I'd imagine a lot of paperwork got back up, but presumably the company business roughly kept going. True or false?
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      I think the overriding lesson I learned from my time doing that job was that people dramatically overestimate their value to a firm. That’s true of ninja rockstar developers and vp directors of business dev. Largely the world keeps turning no matter who leaves a firm no matter the circumstances.
      - sgt101 4y ago
        There is a lot of confirmation bias in this observation. Frankly, the dead have no voices and the missing value and / or damage is often simply unobserved by those who are left. It's rare that the damage is surfaced. I did see an event once though when a fairly senior manager made repeated attempts to hand over some data collection and reporting when they were made redundant but were rebuffed by colleagues and their manager alike. Essentially this person was seen as a bit of a third wheel, and many comments were hurled around during the lay off process along the lines of "not clear what his real contribution is". Well, it turned out that the data that he was collecting, analysising and reporting on was fundamental to the running of a strategic investment. Some months after he left the said project tanked, and because the data was not available a lot of money that potentially should have been recoverable wasn't. So, it cuts both ways.
dexterdog 4y ago
Even a single round is bad because it will cause some of your most hire-able people to look and then likely leave. When a second round comes too close to the first then everybody starts looking hard and the people that stick around are the ones nobody else wants. It would be cheaper to just close the doors.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  If it’s known it’s a single round, it’s easier for everyone remaining to not look around. When a second round breaks that trust though, all bets are off.
  - laserlight 4y ago
    Leaving things to trust is not an option IMHO. Unless a company can guarantee that there won't be another round, they can always change their mind. I'm not sure if any company can give any such guarantee.
    - nrmitchi 4y ago
      That’s a bit disingenuous; of course no company can make a 100% guarantee. There is still a huge difference between “this is the only round of layoffs, we will grow past this” (when this is the true intent) and “that’s all for this week. We’ll be back with the next round of layoffs on Friday”
rmk 4y ago
In my experience, layoffs almost always happen in waves. The first layoff is usually when nonperformers and people who are already on managers' hit lists (people who are hard to fire only for legal reasons) are jettisoned. Later rounds start eating into actually valuable employees. In the interim, many experienced people read between the lines and make for the exits, further depleting the ranks and leaving behind folks who can not or will not look for opportunities elsewhere.

unicornmama 4y ago

Large technology companies won’t hesitate to layoff employees to protect their stock price.

puranjay 4y ago
Remember that debt fuelled stock buybacks were a huge reason for propping up stock prices for these companies as well. Now that cheap debt is off the table, that buyback strategy will have diminishing impact as well, forcing companies to find other ways to keep stock up (such as cutting costs)
- FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
  I don't think VC-backed startups typically do stock buybacks? That's more of a Fortune 500 thing, AFAIK. "Startups" (of whatever size) are always concerned about the next funding round; I don't think they're going to burn runway to prop up the share price. It's companies like GE and IBM that do that, AFAIK.
  - puranjay 4y ago
    I was referring to the OP’s comment that established publicly traded tech companies too will be under pressure to keep the stock price up and thus, aren’t immune to layoffs
    - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
      I see. You have a point there. That would cement, in my mind, their transition from "growth" to "utility" companies, though, and I would expect them to start paying dividends.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I mean the established big tech companies are sitting on mountains of cash. I suspect they’ll start ramping up buybacks even more aggressively due to what they see as undervalued equity.

ushakov 4y ago

they raised $355M this year and like $600M last year https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5/company_finan... how can a company burn money that quickly so they end up with only 12-18 months of runway?

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
No idea. Confirmed the layoff number is 33% as of today. Which is pretty aggressive, they must be hemorrhaging money.
phphphphp 4y ago
very broad strokes: money is raised to be spent. each round gets you to the next, or you reach some measure of sustainability before the money runs out — layoffs like this should be expected, regardless of the amount raised, if there’s a shift in conditions that indicate raising again in 18 months isn’t going to be easy. You can burn any amount of money if you want to.
- version_five 4y ago
  Yes, regardless of Bolt's specific circumstances, this is on point. Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it. Especially for the really big raises, a big part of the motivation is that the company has made a case for how the large amount of money is going to be deployed very quickly (with the goal of generating returns). You don't take $900M of VC funding and stretch it out over 10 years, that's not what they gave it to you for. Whether it's actually possible to usefully deploy all that money is another matter. Generally it's very hard. I only have an up-close perspective on one such large raise (that ultimately failed) but imo the reason they got the money was that they made themselves a credible way to spend so much so quickly.
  - dev_tty01 4y ago
    >Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it. Depends on the economic environment. We are headed for a difficult cycle. Downsizing and doing a raise to at least partially "sit on" might be the best strategy at this moment. Money flow can go from huge to nothing faster than one might imagine.

throway782 4y ago

This is the deflating of the covid hype bubble used to distract the public, for sure. It will be 12-18 months at least before we can tell if a long legged tech washout is upon us.

truthwhisperer 4y ago

icelancer 4y ago

> Current revenue is 40M Last valuation of this company was $10+ billion. Absurd. [0] I'm personally happy to see the correction coming where profits - or lack thereof, more likely around these parts - actually means something these days. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/14/online-checkout-bolt-decacorn/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/14/online-checkout-bolt-decac...

adrr 4y ago

I heard they had 900 employees. It's just a checkout page that plugs into your payment processor. I don't get why they need so many people. Most complicated thing they are probably doing is tokenizing the credit card themselves so the card info is portable across merchants with different processor.

tootie 4y ago
I say the same about how Uber has thousands of engineers working on an app with 6 screens.
- adrr 4y ago
  Uber has scale, they are processing $15+ billion plus in rides a year. Millions of customers and millions of drivers that need tools built to service them.
- sebdufbeau 4y ago
  This link get's thrown around a lot, but here's a former Uber EM explaining why "an app with 6 screens" is misjudged statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
  - tootie 4y ago
    That adds up to maybe 100-200 people in my head. It's not like they rebuild every payment integration every day. I worked for a retailer with >$2B in revenue across stores and 5 websites plus internal tools and we had about 100. And probably half were low cost contractors. Software practices sucked, deploys took forever, they had an ivory tower architecture crew and pie in the sky CTO and yet their digital products all worked fine and made tons of money. Why? Their products and branding were excellent.
- donthellbanme 4y ago
- dehrmann 4y ago

abraxas 4y ago

40M in revenue for the year?! Jesus, my startup is making about half that with a good sales pipeline for this year and we are 55 employees total. We might hire additional handful this year but that's it. How do you even onboard when you double your workforce every few months?

version_five 4y ago
I've seen companies with less revenue and a bigger workforce growing at that rate. They call it blitz-scaling, and I don't know if it's actually ever worked, where I saw it first hand it was basically just setting a pile of money on fire.
- thwarted 4y ago
  Yep, this is what happens when your "growth" metric is employee headcount, under the naïve assumption that more people is a proxy for more work getting done is a proxy for revenue. This may make more sense for a sales-focused organization, less so for marketing or technology driven organization.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    Maybe not a proxy per se, but more like a leading indicator, right? Those big enterprise customers might not ask about revenue, but the sales unit can certainly brag about headcount.
    - alexb_ 4y ago
      The moment that any indicator becomes a goal it instantly becomes completely useless as an indicator or metric for anything.
      - doctor_eval 4y ago
        Absolutely agree. I wrote the comment while thinking, why would a company need a proxy for revenue, when revenue is so easy to count? On reflection I now understand the GP’s point; when revenue is zero, you need something to use instead. But of course revenue (and, having achieved that, then profit IMO) should be among the concrete goals. It’s so weird that this is missed so often.

mrcwinn 4y ago

Similar. It's wild to realize when I was CEO of our startup, we had significantly less name recognition, dramatically less capital raised (by orders of magnitude), a much smaller team. ...and yet apparently significantly more revenue per employee than Bolt. Oh, and we were profitable, infinite runway, good growth, solid unit economics, LTVs we understood. Imagine!

whatever_dude 4y ago
Everybody starts making zero (or negative) dollars. I have no positive view of Bolt myself, but in a situation like this VCs are putting money on future prospects/growth potential, not the early revenue. (Doesn't work if the company goes bust though)
DeathArrow 4y ago
Many CEOs and even investors care less about profits as long as the valuation is sky high. I think Yahoo was never profitable.