5 ms·

I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excite

I don't get the value of this company. How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? Maybe this is the JS boot camp effect.

automatic6131 4y ago
I was just about to make this point. How does "one click checkout" become worth $11B? (massive) Capital misallocation, i'd imagine
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  According to a comment on another thread [1], their annual revenue is $40M. That's a valuation of 275x revenue. And they were seeking to raise another $400M at a $14B valuation [2] — 350x annual revenue! Truly mind boggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation-lift-to-14-billion-weeks-after-raising-last-round https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation...
  - seibelj 4y ago
    I also wonder if that revenue is just the payments they process. If so then true revenue is probably ~2.5% of that.
    - jakelazaroff 4y ago
      As shady as this company is, I would honestly be shocked if they counted the full value of the payment processed as revenue.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  Also isn’t this in somewhat direct competition with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and Stripe? I would not want to bet against any one of those companies, let alone ALL of them.
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Correct, and you didn't even name their toughest competitor - Shopify's one-click checkout.
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      Isn't shopify one-click limited to stores on their platform?
notesinthefield 4y ago
Id be thrilled about the bootcamp scene if Bolt were a direct result of it. But I doubt many are excited any more than motivated to do better.
ceejayoz 4y ago
I do; I've found the reduced friction of Apple Pay and Shopify's ShopPay offerings to be very, very nice from a user perspective. What I don't get is thinking it's so massively compelling as a competitor to these existing systems.
eatonphil 4y ago
See also: the HN comment about Dropbox.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And Jobs ended up being right. Dropbox is a feature not a product. I can get a lot more by spending $99 on O365 + 6Tb of space on OneDrive than I can spending $99 for 2TB on Dropbox.
hotpotamus 4y ago
How did an office sub-leasing company (Wework) become a tech company that was supposed to change they way we live and work and create the first trillionaire, or whatever craziness they cooked up? From what I've seen, you find a charismatic dude with a good story that they probably even believe themselves, and another dude with a lot of money who wants to make that into even more money and you get them together. Then you find more believers. It's more akin to religion than anything else, but employment seems like the new religion for many - it's certainly an integral part of identity.
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  How did a home rental company or a media rental company become a tech company?
  - actusual 4y ago
    I'm confused about what you are trying to imply with your question. Either you are making an argument for "Netflix/AirBnB are considered tech companies, so why not WeWork?". Or you are saying that Netflix/AirBnB aren't actually tech companies? Or are you implying that given enough time, WeWork would have become a tech company, despite its non-technical beginnings? To compare AirBnB/Netflix to WeWork from a technology standpoint doesn't make any sense IMO.
Invictus0 4y ago
To be clear, your question is asking why smart people get excited about simple things that provide a lot of value?
axg11 4y ago
Then you probably don’t understand the value of any big tech company? All of them are premised on ideas that are trivial on the surface but involve difficult engineering challenges at scale.
rubiquity 4y ago
I'm in no way defending Bolt, but your comment exudes snobbery as well as ignorance about what should drive a company's valuation. There are many incredible software engineers that care far more about the problem at hand being solved than whether the technical solution strokes their intellectual ego or not. This type of punching down at other software developers really isn't good.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
What you are experiencing is the cognitive dissonance upon realizing that the last 14 years was nothing but a financial mirage. It is all unraveling now. No one was excited about "one click checkout". They were excited about the ROI.
pjc50 4y ago
That was the original Amazon "one click" patent! It's not the fellow SWEs that care, it's the observation that every step removed from the checkout flow increases conversions and therefore revenue.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Engineering vs Product. You can have very exciting engineering behind what is otherwise a very boring product. I'm currently leading a React Native app team and from an engineering perspective, it's very exciting. Bleeding edge everything, fabric, hermes, beta and alpha versions of multiple devtools, etc. From a product perspective it could not be more boring, we're building an app to help insurance salespeople track their sales. And of course there's always the money, for the right price I'll work on whatever you want me too. If someone offered me a job building Windows Vista widgets for $1M/yr, you can bet I will take the job and be very happy.
TuringNYC 4y ago
Checkout is a problem that requires low latency, high reliability, and difficult decisions about fraud to be decided at the moment. These are hard problems which are interesting to many engineers. It is also a high-value problem, and thus there is compensation to support the hard work.
pevey 4y ago
And it's a one-click checkout that they apparently don't event WANT to be widely adopted. There is no pricing info on their web site. It is a "call us" type of sales pipeline. I pointed this out in another thread yesterday, and some people responded that this is fine because it is geared toward enterprise. But it's really not fine. It turns a lot of companies away, even somewhat large one. And the nature of the product is that they want network effects. They want it to be widely adopted. Trying to do that from the largest companies down was a poor strategy. The early adopters will be the mid-size companies with involved owner willing to try something new. Then the enterprise sheep and time-crunched small businesses will follow, after they see others using it. But a meaningful portion of mid-sized companies who are interested get lost in the very first step of the funnel, when they get to the site and can't find even basic information about how much it would cost. Compare this to Stripe (which I currently use at 2 different companies in 2 different industries) which manages to be very transparent about all pricing and still have an enterprise sales channel that can make larger deals with discounts.
icelancer 4y ago
>> How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? I'd be willing to bet like 80-90% of SWEs are just people who write code 9-5, have little passion for the job, and just collect paychecks like most people in America. HN and Slashdot and so forth provide a very skewed view on our profession. So when Bolt offers people over-market wages for skills writing JS/PHP and some basic database stuff... a four day work week... strong culture of "doing enough" (aka Fried's mantra at Basecamp), why not take it? It's just a job to them.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I had a former coworker who has a doctorate in physics with an emphasis in nuclear engineering, then a masters in CS. She ended up coding Rails at a startup because it paid better. The market demands its CRUD.
  - walleeee 4y ago
    hopefully the dip we're toppling into will do a number on this kind of incentive
dntrkv 4y ago
Of all the services to complain about, one-click checkout should be near the bottom of the list. For the users, it provides a great UX and prevents the need to give your personal/CC info to every random site that you wish to purchase from. For the business, it can significantly improve conversion, reduce fraud, and reduce eng time for payment integration.
shalltell 4y ago
How can you not get excited or at least, curiously so, to see how they solve this "problem"? How is bolt going to be better or different than PayPal checkout or the amazing Apple Pay checkout (I literally use Safari for this). PayPal checkout kinda sucks (the UX was bad when I used it years ago, not sure how its improved). Apple Pay is way better on UX, but can only be used in specific cases. Simplifying something complex that the user uses as a one-click can/is exciting. I don't think Bolt is the solution though.
aluva 4y ago
There is some truth to this, not the job for everyone. I personally know the current CEO and I was surprised when he joined the company as CTO. As far as I know CTO at the very least should be familiar with latest and greatest technology.
bpicolo 4y ago
There are a lot of product-minded engineers out there (user-facing outcomes focused). There are also a lot of engineers who enjoy the engineering decisions and challenges at particular stages of a company's growth. Both (and many others) are good and healthy mindsets. You don't have to be a kernel hacker to be a good or motivated engineer.
scarface74 4y ago
You mean why would developers actually care about solving business problems?

automatic6131 4y ago

I was just about to make this point. How does "one click checkout" become worth $11B? (massive) Capital misallocation, i'd imagine

jakelazaroff 4y ago
According to a comment on another thread [1], their annual revenue is $40M. That's a valuation of 275x revenue. And they were seeking to raise another $400M at a $14B valuation [2] — 350x annual revenue! Truly mind boggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31510453 [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation-lift-to-14-billion-weeks-after-raising-last-round https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-seeks-valuation...
- seibelj 4y ago
  I also wonder if that revenue is just the payments they process. If so then true revenue is probably ~2.5% of that.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    As shady as this company is, I would honestly be shocked if they counted the full value of the payment processed as revenue.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
dghlsakjg 4y ago
Also isn’t this in somewhat direct competition with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and Stripe? I would not want to bet against any one of those companies, let alone ALL of them.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Correct, and you didn't even name their toughest competitor - Shopify's one-click checkout.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Isn't shopify one-click limited to stores on their platform?

notesinthefield 4y ago

Id be thrilled about the bootcamp scene if Bolt were a direct result of it. But I doubt many are excited any more than motivated to do better.

ceejayoz 4y ago

I do; I've found the reduced friction of Apple Pay and Shopify's ShopPay offerings to be very, very nice from a user perspective. What I don't get is thinking it's so massively compelling as a competitor to these existing systems.

eatonphil 4y ago

See also: the HN comment about Dropbox.

scarface74 4y ago
And Jobs ended up being right. Dropbox is a feature not a product. I can get a lot more by spending $99 on O365 + 6Tb of space on OneDrive than I can spending $99 for 2TB on Dropbox.

hotpotamus 4y ago

How did an office sub-leasing company (Wework) become a tech company that was supposed to change they way we live and work and create the first trillionaire, or whatever craziness they cooked up? From what I've seen, you find a charismatic dude with a good story that they probably even believe themselves, and another dude with a lot of money who wants to make that into even more money and you get them together. Then you find more believers. It's more akin to religion than anything else, but employment seems like the new religion for many - it's certainly an integral part of identity.

8ytecoder 4y ago
How did a home rental company or a media rental company become a tech company?
- actusual 4y ago
  I'm confused about what you are trying to imply with your question. Either you are making an argument for "Netflix/AirBnB are considered tech companies, so why not WeWork?". Or you are saying that Netflix/AirBnB aren't actually tech companies? Or are you implying that given enough time, WeWork would have become a tech company, despite its non-technical beginnings? To compare AirBnB/Netflix to WeWork from a technology standpoint doesn't make any sense IMO.

Invictus0 4y ago

To be clear, your question is asking why smart people get excited about simple things that provide a lot of value?

axg11 4y ago

Then you probably don’t understand the value of any big tech company? All of them are premised on ideas that are trivial on the surface but involve difficult engineering challenges at scale.

rubiquity 4y ago

I'm in no way defending Bolt, but your comment exudes snobbery as well as ignorance about what should drive a company's valuation. There are many incredible software engineers that care far more about the problem at hand being solved than whether the technical solution strokes their intellectual ego or not. This type of punching down at other software developers really isn't good.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

What you are experiencing is the cognitive dissonance upon realizing that the last 14 years was nothing but a financial mirage. It is all unraveling now. No one was excited about "one click checkout". They were excited about the ROI.

pjc50 4y ago

That was the original Amazon "one click" patent! It's not the fellow SWEs that care, it's the observation that every step removed from the checkout flow increases conversions and therefore revenue.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Engineering vs Product. You can have very exciting engineering behind what is otherwise a very boring product. I'm currently leading a React Native app team and from an engineering perspective, it's very exciting. Bleeding edge everything, fabric, hermes, beta and alpha versions of multiple devtools, etc. From a product perspective it could not be more boring, we're building an app to help insurance salespeople track their sales. And of course there's always the money, for the right price I'll work on whatever you want me too. If someone offered me a job building Windows Vista widgets for $1M/yr, you can bet I will take the job and be very happy.

TuringNYC 4y ago

Checkout is a problem that requires low latency, high reliability, and difficult decisions about fraud to be decided at the moment. These are hard problems which are interesting to many engineers. It is also a high-value problem, and thus there is compensation to support the hard work.

pevey 4y ago

And it's a one-click checkout that they apparently don't event WANT to be widely adopted. There is no pricing info on their web site. It is a "call us" type of sales pipeline. I pointed this out in another thread yesterday, and some people responded that this is fine because it is geared toward enterprise. But it's really not fine. It turns a lot of companies away, even somewhat large one. And the nature of the product is that they want network effects. They want it to be widely adopted. Trying to do that from the largest companies down was a poor strategy. The early adopters will be the mid-size companies with involved owner willing to try something new. Then the enterprise sheep and time-crunched small businesses will follow, after they see others using it. But a meaningful portion of mid-sized companies who are interested get lost in the very first step of the funnel, when they get to the site and can't find even basic information about how much it would cost. Compare this to Stripe (which I currently use at 2 different companies in 2 different industries) which manages to be very transparent about all pricing and still have an enterprise sales channel that can make larger deals with discounts.

icelancer 4y ago

>> How can fellow SWEs who learnt about kernels, networks and hardware (among other incredibly complicated works) get excited about ONE CLICK CHECKOUT? I'd be willing to bet like 80-90% of SWEs are just people who write code 9-5, have little passion for the job, and just collect paychecks like most people in America. HN and Slashdot and so forth provide a very skewed view on our profession. So when Bolt offers people over-market wages for skills writing JS/PHP and some basic database stuff... a four day work week... strong culture of "doing enough" (aka Fried's mantra at Basecamp), why not take it? It's just a job to them.

Apocryphon 4y ago
I had a former coworker who has a doctorate in physics with an emphasis in nuclear engineering, then a masters in CS. She ended up coding Rails at a startup because it paid better. The market demands its CRUD.
- walleeee 4y ago
  hopefully the dip we're toppling into will do a number on this kind of incentive

dntrkv 4y ago

Of all the services to complain about, one-click checkout should be near the bottom of the list. For the users, it provides a great UX and prevents the need to give your personal/CC info to every random site that you wish to purchase from. For the business, it can significantly improve conversion, reduce fraud, and reduce eng time for payment integration.

shalltell 4y ago

How can you not get excited or at least, curiously so, to see how they solve this "problem"? How is bolt going to be better or different than PayPal checkout or the amazing Apple Pay checkout (I literally use Safari for this). PayPal checkout kinda sucks (the UX was bad when I used it years ago, not sure how its improved). Apple Pay is way better on UX, but can only be used in specific cases. Simplifying something complex that the user uses as a one-click can/is exciting. I don't think Bolt is the solution though.

aluva 4y ago

There is some truth to this, not the job for everyone. I personally know the current CEO and I was surprised when he joined the company as CTO. As far as I know CTO at the very least should be familiar with latest and greatest technology.

bpicolo 4y ago

There are a lot of product-minded engineers out there (user-facing outcomes focused). There are also a lot of engineers who enjoy the engineering decisions and challenges at particular stages of a company's growth. Both (and many others) are good and healthy mindsets. You don't have to be a kernel hacker to be a good or motivated engineer.

scarface74 4y ago

You mean why would developers actually care about solving business problems?