[ketzo]

> There are all these horror stories in Silicon Valley of these companies who got to 150 or 200 million revenue and then didn’t grow

Yeah, what a nightmare that must be.

I’m being a little glib here — I understand that if you’re making $200M at a cost of $400M and your investors are expecting $2B and you stop growing… you’re in deep shit.

But christ, people, can’t we get a little perspective?

[kimixa]

"Infinite Growth or Death" is an impossible goal but still people seem to strive for it.

Though most VC funding seems to have the explicit goal of "Burn cash to drive out competition so you have a monopoly, then abuse your market position to wring your locked-in customers dry", which feels awful from a consumer POV.

[anon35]

It sounds like you already have exactly the right perspective. It _is_ a nightmare. That $200M isn't their money, it's not in their pockets, and it's far short of what it was hoped to be. You framed it perfectly, and so did they: they're in deep shit, and it's a horror story.

[boringg]

What do you mean can't we get a little perspective? In terms of running a company vs the real world? Sure but this thread here is a more targeted conversation.

If you make 150-200 M in revenue and can't grow bridge the gap from revenue to profit to sustain operations you have a serious problem on your hands. I think you need a bit of perspective on what that means as you now have a lot of dependent workforce that you likely have to layoff to bridge it.

Yes it is impressive to make it to that point of revenue but your future is looking difficult especially as you probably have layoffs in the future - which is awful.

[superdisk]

How do you spend $400M?

[bsder]

Too many salaries.

VCs want you to go big or go home so they want you to hire. Hiring decreases your runway dramatically.

$100 million lasts practically forever for 2 people. $100 million lasts through most problems for 10-15 people. $100 million doesn't last very long at all for 100 people.

[xnorswap]

It should be noted that outside of the US tech bubble, $100m lasts plenty long for 100 people, even with overheads.

[ctvo]

> outside of the US tech bubble, $100m lasts plenty long for 100 people, even with overheads.

Outside where? The EU? Plenty long... like 5 years?

150K per employee on average with overhead (additional benefits, tax contributions, health care -- whatever other expenses). 15,000,000 a year.

Add in real estate, equipment, other capital expenses. Yeah, looks like ~5 years.

[bsder]

If you have $100m, the implication is that the VCs want to see a unicorn (>$1 billion). You will be engaging in a lot of sales, marketing and engineering activity to get there. Your activity is expensive.

And nobody is getting $100 million anymore. Good raises are now in the $10 million range and that doesn't last long at all even if you only have a small number of employees.

[anon1199022]

+ fancy office etc. Remember what twitter office was offering with no profit for the company? any extra was coming from companies potential profit

[ethanbond]

It’s a nice meme about Twitter being an atrocious business etc (and it wasn’t great/it was struggling for much of its existence), but Twitter made $1.2 and $1.4 billion in profit in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

[inemesitaffia]

Wasn't lifetime profitable

[ethanbond]

Like most high-growth tech businesses throughout most of their lifetime. Fair critique of the industry at large IMO, but it’s very much “by design.”