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> The startup — Things Inc. — was founded in 2021, raising $8 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and $2 million from various angel investors, in

> The startup — Things Inc. — was founded in 2021, raising $8 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and $2 million from various angel investors, including Adobe’s Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, among others. After burning funds too quickly at first, the team downsized their 10-person team to just the three founders in order to maintain enough runway. Now, Rooms.xyz has somewhere around four-plus years, Toff says. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets-you-build-interactive-3d-rooms-and-simple-games-in-your-browser/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

morgante 3y ago
That still seems kind of odd. At 10 person team, assuming ~$250k annual cost per employee, should have a runway of 4 years. Something else must have happened (ex. dramatic pivot; profligate spending early on) to necessitate layoffs right now.
- mihird9 3y ago
  I mean, how does a company hire 7 employees based on the funding/money they've raised, and then layoff every single one of those 7 hired employees in a span of about 1 year? With such planning/decision making, and no business model in place, how do VCs even fund them in the first place?
  - yunohn 3y ago
    > Prior to Rooms, Toff spent 10 years at Google, off and on, in product marketing and product management, including at YouTube, Area 120 and in VR/AR. Before that, he spent a couple of years at Vine as product manager, including after it was acquired by Twitter. And most recently, Toff worked at Meta, where he dabbled with new product experiments, like the zine maker E.gg and music-making app Collab, among other things. I don’t think the founders are particularly good at making their employers money either. They kept jumping between experimental projects that went nowhere.

morgante 3y ago

That still seems kind of odd. At 10 person team, assuming ~$250k annual cost per employee, should have a runway of 4 years. Something else must have happened (ex. dramatic pivot; profligate spending early on) to necessitate layoffs right now.

mihird9 3y ago
I mean, how does a company hire 7 employees based on the funding/money they've raised, and then layoff every single one of those 7 hired employees in a span of about 1 year? With such planning/decision making, and no business model in place, how do VCs even fund them in the first place?
- yunohn 3y ago
  > Prior to Rooms, Toff spent 10 years at Google, off and on, in product marketing and product management, including at YouTube, Area 120 and in VR/AR. Before that, he spent a couple of years at Vine as product manager, including after it was acquired by Twitter. And most recently, Toff worked at Meta, where he dabbled with new product experiments, like the zine maker E.gg and music-making app Collab, among other things. I don’t think the founders are particularly good at making their employers money either. They kept jumping between experimental projects that went nowhere.