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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are exceptions of course. The risk to reward ratio seems pretty bad to me, though.