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My best guess is that raising funding helps raise the valuation, especially as they approach IPO. So raise money for the sake of raising the valuation. You don

My best guess is that raising funding helps raise the valuation, especially as they approach IPO. So raise money for the sake of raising the valuation. You don’t really need the money, but you got it. What are you going to do with it to appease the investors? Well you gotta act like you are doing something with it, especially something that shows growth. Hire more. Hire more because we imagine more. Keep imagining until imagining doesn’t work anymore. Then fire, and say sorry. Hopefully you sold enough equity at the ridiculous ipo price. Sorry, but not sorry.

bfeynman 4y ago
classic vc growth story, almost a fairy tale.
rvz 4y ago
This is no different to other tech companies and startups that have over hired during the low interest hype and have aggressively raised money. It is essentially the VC hype cycle and are meant to dump their holdings on retail once the stock is publicly listed. We're all just see how tech startups and other companies are getting slaughtered over market conditions and NOW need to cut costs, spend less, hire less and turn a profit rather than continued losses. The era of "Lose money for decades just like Amazon did and so can we" is over.
- eru 4y ago
  > [...] that have over hired during the low interest hype [...] Well, in a sense that's exactly what low interest rates were supposed to accomplish: get people in the economy to spend.
- forthefuture 4y ago
  Amazon was founded in 1994 and turned their first profit in 2001. A better example would be Uber, which ran negative until they had less than one year of runway remaining and then were somehow allowed to scam pedestrians into keeping their unprofitable taxi business solvent.
  - szpght 4y ago
    what do you mean by scam pedestrians?
    - forthefuture 4y ago
      Uber lost all of the money all of the original investors gave them, and sold that bag of dog shit to the public. Everyone who bought the IPO lost money.
_fat_santa 4y ago
I interviewed with them last year and while I didn't get the job, looking back now I'm kind of thankful it turned out how it did. From my limited perspective interviewing there, it seems like they started branching out into all things crypto. One manager I interviewed with explained that they wanted to become the "Amazon of Crypto" where any service related to crypto such as wallets, NFT's, etc are all on Coinbase. It was clear back then to me that Coinbase wanted to dethrone both Metamask as the wallet of choice and OpenSea as the NFT marketplace of choice. You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out. Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.
  - cmsj 4y ago
    Presumably the difference is that those 5 people really wanted to build OpenSea, where Coinbase staff were just assigned to projects.
  - robswc 4y ago
    I agree with your sentiment and I think you would agree with this, just wanted to get it out there. I've seen teams of 10-15 people that do absolutely nothing. Have 10 meetings about specs but space them out over a year, so that by the time the next meeting happens, everyone forgets the entire context of the project... so you have to cover everything again. By the end of year, its gone absolutely no where due to 2-3 layers of bureaucracy. Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem.
    - vgatherps 4y ago
      > Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem. I've worked at a company where at an individual level people were quite talented, moreso than competitors who did better than them .... but getting anything done required Y different meetings with X different teams, satisfying N different gatekeepers who just want to push their own product on you, avoid stepping on the toes of persons X,Y,Z, etc etc. Company multiplied in size a few times over the course of a few years and had just no idea how to handle it.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely. It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.
- kingkawn 4y ago
  Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown
  - roflc0ptic 4y ago
    This is silly hyperbole. I was paying honest attention to crypto and I was continually surprised that it didn’t crash. Eventually I gave up and stopped guessing it was going to crash. Then it did :shrug:
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Bitcoin has dropped about the same amount as Netflix, Meta and Tesla (~70-74%) It has significantly outperformed VC darlings like Peloton (-93%) and WeWork (-90%). You can't tell me that WeWork stock wasn't working on the greater fool theory any more than Bitcoin's price works on finding more bagholders. It's all a grift, some worse than others.
      - ycombobreaker 4y ago
        Peloton in particular was a beneficiary of the pandemic and lockdowns. With no ill will, I'm content to see their stock price drop if it is correlated with an improvement in the general state of the world. It's absolutely not informative to compare their returns to various crypto.
        dilyevsky 4y ago
        Peloton got massively mismanaged by its ceo.
deleted 4y ago
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bfeynman 4y ago

classic vc growth story, almost a fairy tale.

rvz 4y ago

This is no different to other tech companies and startups that have over hired during the low interest hype and have aggressively raised money. It is essentially the VC hype cycle and are meant to dump their holdings on retail once the stock is publicly listed. We're all just see how tech startups and other companies are getting slaughtered over market conditions and NOW need to cut costs, spend less, hire less and turn a profit rather than continued losses. The era of "Lose money for decades just like Amazon did and so can we" is over.

eru 4y ago
> [...] that have over hired during the low interest hype [...] Well, in a sense that's exactly what low interest rates were supposed to accomplish: get people in the economy to spend.
forthefuture 4y ago
Amazon was founded in 1994 and turned their first profit in 2001. A better example would be Uber, which ran negative until they had less than one year of runway remaining and then were somehow allowed to scam pedestrians into keeping their unprofitable taxi business solvent.
- szpght 4y ago
  what do you mean by scam pedestrians?
  - forthefuture 4y ago
    Uber lost all of the money all of the original investors gave them, and sold that bag of dog shit to the public. Everyone who bought the IPO lost money.

_fat_santa 4y ago

I interviewed with them last year and while I didn't get the job, looking back now I'm kind of thankful it turned out how it did. From my limited perspective interviewing there, it seems like they started branching out into all things crypto. One manager I interviewed with explained that they wanted to become the "Amazon of Crypto" where any service related to crypto such as wallets, NFT's, etc are all on Coinbase. It was clear back then to me that Coinbase wanted to dethrone both Metamask as the wallet of choice and OpenSea as the NFT marketplace of choice. You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out.

Alex3917 4y ago
> You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out. Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.
- cmsj 4y ago
  Presumably the difference is that those 5 people really wanted to build OpenSea, where Coinbase staff were just assigned to projects.
- robswc 4y ago
  I agree with your sentiment and I think you would agree with this, just wanted to get it out there. I've seen teams of 10-15 people that do absolutely nothing. Have 10 meetings about specs but space them out over a year, so that by the time the next meeting happens, everyone forgets the entire context of the project... so you have to cover everything again. By the end of year, its gone absolutely no where due to 2-3 layers of bureaucracy. Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem.
  - vgatherps 4y ago
    > Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem. I've worked at a company where at an individual level people were quite talented, moreso than competitors who did better than them .... but getting anything done required Y different meetings with X different teams, satisfying N different gatekeepers who just want to push their own product on you, avoid stepping on the toes of persons X,Y,Z, etc etc. Company multiplied in size a few times over the course of a few years and had just no idea how to handle it.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely. It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.

kingkawn 4y ago
Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown
- roflc0ptic 4y ago
  This is silly hyperbole. I was paying honest attention to crypto and I was continually surprised that it didn’t crash. Eventually I gave up and stopped guessing it was going to crash. Then it did :shrug:
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Bitcoin has dropped about the same amount as Netflix, Meta and Tesla (~70-74%) It has significantly outperformed VC darlings like Peloton (-93%) and WeWork (-90%). You can't tell me that WeWork stock wasn't working on the greater fool theory any more than Bitcoin's price works on finding more bagholders. It's all a grift, some worse than others.
    - ycombobreaker 4y ago
      Peloton in particular was a beneficiary of the pandemic and lockdowns. With no ill will, I'm content to see their stock price drop if it is correlated with an improvement in the general state of the world. It's absolutely not informative to compare their returns to various crypto.
      - dilyevsky 4y ago
        Peloton got massively mismanaged by its ceo.

deleted 4y ago

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