3 ms·

For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit

For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd. $240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed. So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ? Having 500 employees won’t speed things up and would actually slow down development - so why so much funding? Or who actually waits that long? The first version of Windows 10 was released about 10 years ago and soon will be EOL. I feel software investment is like some oil ETFs — there is more investment money than the thing to invest in…

hu3 1y ago
Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud. Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.
- hobofan 1y ago
  The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0 GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work). For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially 0 cost per customer.
riku_iki 1y ago
what about marketing and sales?
JimDabell 1y ago
Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.
- hobofan 1y ago
  n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which is where there valuation originates and where the money will go to. Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the insane prices they charge.
bix6 1y ago
This money will be gone in 2-3 years! They say engineering but I bet half goes to marketing. > The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring. https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lands-2-5b-valuation-with-180m-series-c https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...

hu3 1y ago

Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud. Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.

hobofan 1y ago
The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0 GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work). For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially 0 cost per customer.

riku_iki 1y ago

what about marketing and sales?

JimDabell 1y ago

Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.

hobofan 1y ago
n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which is where there valuation originates and where the money will go to. Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the insane prices they charge.

bix6 1y ago

This money will be gone in 2-3 years! They say engineering but I bet half goes to marketing. > The focus for the fresh funding will be on expanding its engineering capabilities and hiring. https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lands-2-5b-valuation-with-180m-series-c https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/ai-agent-startup-n8n-lan...