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That's insane! I think a good future indicator before joining any company is their hypergrowth ... avoid at all cost. Smoke and mirrors. When you hear CEOs blat

That's insane! I think a good future indicator before joining any company is their hypergrowth ... avoid at all cost. Smoke and mirrors. When you hear CEOs blathering on doubling, tripling etc .. headcount ... run ...

steve_adams_86 4y ago
Absolutely! I’ve avoided hyper growth companies for many years and I’m very glad I made that decision. There are sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places, but ultimately you are most likely to become irrelevant and disposable. Even if you’re a particularly talented and capable person, very few companies are run well enough to ever expose and utilize that. Your career is at risk of stagnating, I think. There are exceptions of course. The risk to reward ratio seems pretty bad to me, though.
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  > sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places yeah, it is a lottery. Though more often than not is paper money that never realized into actual $$$. I did my fair share of it, but eventually went for steady long term income, slower growth but sustainable. I see it as investing in single stocks or boring mutual funds.
beambot 4y ago
I'm quite the opposite: Twilio's revenue tripled from 2019 to today; if their headcount didn't triple to support that growth, I'd run away!
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  How much of their revenue came in because of acquisitions like Segment? That said, sustainable growth is ok, Twilio's head count growth was "wild" to put it mild.
- shagie 4y ago
  (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 ) Tripling the revenue and headcount would be ok if they could make this line go up (or even stay level) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+... As it is, the number is negative and the slope is negative.
- acchow 4y ago
  You should hope that a software business would scale non-linearly with employees.
  - beambot 4y ago
    SG&A, which includes sales & marketing, grew 3.06x since 2019 -- so linearly with revenue growth, as is typical for enterprise B2B. And on the engineering front: If they're not investing substantially in R&D, then they're likely going to flame out in the coming decade. R&D expense grew 2.62x in the same timeframe.

steve_adams_86 4y ago

Absolutely! I’ve avoided hyper growth companies for many years and I’m very glad I made that decision. There are sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places, but ultimately you are most likely to become irrelevant and disposable. Even if you’re a particularly talented and capable person, very few companies are run well enough to ever expose and utilize that. Your career is at risk of stagnating, I think. There are exceptions of course. The risk to reward ratio seems pretty bad to me, though.

Patrol8394 4y ago
> sometimes attractive salaries and roles at these places yeah, it is a lottery. Though more often than not is paper money that never realized into actual $$$. I did my fair share of it, but eventually went for steady long term income, slower growth but sustainable. I see it as investing in single stocks or boring mutual funds.

beambot 4y ago

I'm quite the opposite: Twilio's revenue tripled from 2019 to today; if their headcount didn't triple to support that growth, I'd run away!

Patrol8394 4y ago
How much of their revenue came in because of acquisitions like Segment? That said, sustainable growth is ok, Twilio's head count growth was "wild" to put it mild.
shagie 4y ago
(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34777320 ) Tripling the revenue and headcount would be ok if they could make this line go up (or even stay level) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+number+of+employees https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=TWLO+profit+divided+by+... As it is, the number is negative and the slope is negative.
acchow 4y ago
You should hope that a software business would scale non-linearly with employees.
- beambot 4y ago
  SG&A, which includes sales & marketing, grew 3.06x since 2019 -- so linearly with revenue growth, as is typical for enterprise B2B. And on the engineering front: If they're not investing substantially in R&D, then they're likely going to flame out in the coming decade. R&D expense grew 2.62x in the same timeframe.