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So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so

So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high. The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles. Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth! EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...

ipaddr 3y ago
Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.
- iainctduncan 3y ago
  Yeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business. We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
- flatline 3y ago
  You really don’t need a ton of staff dedicated to those things in a 100 person company. This is still a small business by most measures. A C Suite? It could be a sole owner still at that size, though it is stretching the margins. Roles tend to be less differentiated in small companies, and many of those functions are filled informally. That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  You dont have all this in most small sized companies. Silos exist only when you grow big.
  - cmckn 3y ago
    I’ve never seen these kind of roles even in huge companies. “Sprint master” as a job description? Can’t be serious.
    - eru 3y ago
      Well, I've heard of 'scum masters' (sorry, scrum masters) as a job description. So 'sprint master' doesn't sound too ridiculous by comparison.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
iainctduncan 3y ago
Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it. I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.
- mst 3y ago
  This is the point where I wonder if partnering with quinnypig's crew might not make sense in terms of effectively serving those clients.
nluken 3y ago
Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity. Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it. I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.
- iainctduncan 3y ago
  You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence. I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python, Javascript, C++, and Scheme. You would be very hard pressed to find someone as embedded in the problem domain of bandcamp who also does acquisitions related work. So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts. As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
iainctduncan 3y ago
Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment, and that they will get 20% year over year growth for about five years. While the bad rep of PE certainly came from somewhere, in my expereince over the last five years of working in the field, I would way rather be at a profitable, sensible, PE owned company than a VC funded "disruptor" gunning for the big IPO or google acquisition. Our world is positively normal compared to the FAANG scene. We see people who have been at at the companies for 10 to 15 years all the time. Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.
- js2 3y ago
  > we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut Please tell that to Apollo Global Management as loudly as you can. I mean, if they're one of your customers.
- hhsectech 3y ago
  "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it. PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money. They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things. I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery. Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
pharmakom 3y ago
They run something equivalent to Spotify at a much smaller scale.
smcg 3y ago
You work for private equity. Private equity is the problem. You work for vampires.

ipaddr 3y ago

Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.

iainctduncan 3y ago
Yeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business. We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
flatline 3y ago
You really don’t need a ton of staff dedicated to those things in a 100 person company. This is still a small business by most measures. A C Suite? It could be a sole owner still at that size, though it is stretching the margins. Roles tend to be less differentiated in small companies, and many of those functions are filled informally. That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
ekianjo 3y ago
You dont have all this in most small sized companies. Silos exist only when you grow big.
- cmckn 3y ago
  I’ve never seen these kind of roles even in huge companies. “Sprint master” as a job description? Can’t be serious.
  - eru 3y ago
    Well, I've heard of 'scum masters' (sorry, scrum masters) as a job description. So 'sprint master' doesn't sound too ridiculous by comparison.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

iainctduncan 3y ago

Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it. I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.

mst 3y ago
This is the point where I wonder if partnering with quinnypig's crew might not make sense in terms of effectively serving those clients.

nluken 3y ago

Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity. Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it. I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.

iainctduncan 3y ago
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence. I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python, Javascript, C++, and Scheme. You would be very hard pressed to find someone as embedded in the problem domain of bandcamp who also does acquisitions related work. So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts. As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.

iainctduncan 3y ago

Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment, and that they will get 20% year over year growth for about five years. While the bad rep of PE certainly came from somewhere, in my expereince over the last five years of working in the field, I would way rather be at a profitable, sensible, PE owned company than a VC funded "disruptor" gunning for the big IPO or google acquisition. Our world is positively normal compared to the FAANG scene. We see people who have been at at the companies for 10 to 15 years all the time. Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.

js2 3y ago
> we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut Please tell that to Apollo Global Management as loudly as you can. I mean, if they're one of your customers.
hhsectech 3y ago
"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it. PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money. They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things. I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery. Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago

pharmakom 3y ago

They run something equivalent to Spotify at a much smaller scale.

smcg 3y ago

You work for private equity. Private equity is the problem. You work for vampires.