4 ms·

Hm OK well thinking out loud, $100M / 3 is $33M / year? I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company, but I thought it was m

• fragmede 2y ago
  > I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company $33m/year is only 33 fully loaded software developers including all overhead like HR and managers and office space, and also a cloud hosting bill. 33 really isn't that many.
  • johnbellone 2y ago
    I'd be surprised if the average package for SWE is $1M/year (fully loaded).
    • YetAnotherNick 2y ago
      Generally package is around half of what company spends per extra engineer. And $500k average for a tech heavy product company doesn't sound too far off.
      • MrDarcy 2y ago
        This is just wrong. What exactly do think companies are spending 500k on per engineer beyond the TC package?
        • throwaway98797 2y ago
          office space of course!
        • andruby 2y ago
          HR, marketing, sales, management, office space, servers, licenses, insurance, etc. It seems on the high end, but not too unrealistic.
          • hug 2y ago
            It’s wildly and hugely unrealistic. The rule of thumb that employees actually cost a business roughly twice their salary is based on two things: 1. Retention. Hiring costs are “huge”, and so if you have a higher or lower average retention, may make up a disproportionate cost compared to salary. Ramp up time and institutional knowledge loss is no joke either. 2. A spread of average wages. 500k is not average, and a huge number of the costs are relatively fixed. $1,000 a month worth of software licensing isn’t an uncommon number and is fully 1/3 of the salary of a $3k a month or $36k/year junior clerk. It’s peanuts when you look at it next to a $500k/year salary. It may be that the clerk is, all in, costing the company 3x their salary after indemnity insurance and so on. The dev will never reach 10%.
            • purplepatrick 2y ago
              Non-salary cost such as payroll taxes, benefits, workers comp, training, equipment, space add another 25-50% typically.
              • MrDarcy 1y ago
                They don’t, those are fixed. Even taxes are capped because TC includes equity. For a 500K dev GP is correct, additional expenses will never reach 50K for someone making 500K.
          • Loudergood 2y ago
            US Health Insurance is stupid expensive as well.
      • nialv7 2y ago
        Holy hell I need to ask for a raise.
        • klooney 2y ago
          When people say they get 500k they mean they get paid 200k in salary and got 300k in RSUs, with the details mixed around the edges. ICs aren't getting 500k salary except in a few rare cases.
      • rafram 2y ago
        > $500k average for a tech heavy product company doesn't sound too far off. Tailscale puts salary ranges on their job postings. The salaries aren’t bad, but no, they aren’t $500k.
        • YetAnotherNick 2y ago
          Didn't knew that. It's significantly lower than $500k.
      • xeromal 2y ago
        Funny enough, you could double that to 70 engineers and that's still a TINY amount of engineers.
    • udev4096 2y ago
      This might be true for HFT companies. They usually start at 200-300k and mid senior engineers probably make close to a million
  • anilakar 2y ago
    33M would be 33 software consultants each making 250k a year.
• kenrose 2y ago
  You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll. A few other things: 1. Go-to-market costs Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, content, partnerships, etc. These aren't trivial line items. 2. Enterprise sales motion Selling to large orgs is a different beast. Longer cycles, custom security reviews, procurement bureaucracy... it all requires dedicated teams. Those teams cost money and take time to ramp. 3. Product and infra Though Tailscale uses a control-plane-only model (which helps with infra cost), there's still significant R&D investment. As the product footprint grows (ACLs, policy routing, audit logging, device management), you need more engineers, PMs, designers, QA, support. Growth adds complexity. 4. Strategic bets Companies at this stage often use capital to fund moonshots (like rethinking what secure networking looks like when identity is the core primitive instead of IP addresses). I don't know how they're thinking about it, but it may mean building new standards on top of the duct-taped 1980s-era networking stack the modern Internet still runs on. It's not just product evolution, it's protocol-level reinvention. That kind of standardization and stewardship takes a lot of time and a lot of dollars. $160M is a big number. But scaling a category-defining infrastructure company isn't cheap and it's about more than just paying engineers.
  • croemer 2y ago
    At least tailscale funnel isn't control-plane-only, unless I'm totally misunderstanding something
  • lukeholder 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dblohm7 2y ago
      I can confirm that kenrose is an actual human being :-)
      • 2y ago
• chrisshroba 2y ago
  >I'm sure they have some cloud fees, but I thought it was mostly "control plane" and not data plane Don't they host the relay servers that are the fallback if NAT hole punching and their other bag of tricks doesn't work?