Soti – A $1B firm built in a basement
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Well yeah, he's trying to run a software business in Mississauga. As a developer who used to commute to the 'Saug every day: very few of us want to work there. No decent food, no after work fun, just suburb hell for miles around.
He's competing with the banks and Amazon downtown in Toronto proper. He's also competing with Google Waterloo 30 minutes in the other direction for people not interested in living in the city. And he's going to be competing with them on pay as well as location.
Edit: woo, this may be my most controversial comment ever based on the point swings. I welcome counterpoints! Discussion is always good.
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211068518-Use-Y...
What amazing metrics they have! /s
If you're trying to hire for a place people don't want to work in or if you're having issues with skill levels of new hires, the solution is to widen the net: Not in terms of skill ranges, but in terms of geography.
Not everyone wants to work remotely and that's fine. Especially considering that for the vast majority of people, there is someone better than them out there that desperately wants remote work.
Right, no issues hiring, but maybe some issues managing, communicating effectively, and completing work. You're potentially trading one set of problems for another.
Perhaps they've tried a bit of remote and it hasn't worked for them. We don't know.
When I hear comments like this I roll my eyes because those issues aren’t remote issues, those are incompetent manager issues – issues that don’t get resolved by simply sitting in an office.
Management, communication and productivity are challenges regardless of work location. Why do many remote companies “make it work” while others fail? My theory is it has nothing to do with on-site vs remote. It’s a scapegoat used by insecure or incompetent managers who lead mediocre employees they shouldn’t have hired in the first place.
If your workers can’t perform in a remote environment, then they aren’t going to suddenly get better by virtue of sharing a ping pong table.
For remote work a manager has to be more on top of keeping track of his/her employees.
I understand you have strong opinions about this, FWIW I work remotely so yeah I get it.
It's much more than this for me. Coding still requires teamwork, and, short of everyone being able to execute perfectly without in-person discussion, it's useful to communicate with all human gestures being immediately apparent.
I'm surprised at the level of negativity here against office work. I expected people to argue it as another option- not that it should always be the only option for effective teams. I say this as someone who works remotely, and who prefers office work with the right people and not too long of a commute.
I think the bigger issue is just finding the right people with whom you work effectively, not whether work is done in the office or remotely.
This strikes me as a bit rude and prejudicial. Not all of us are rockstars who can function effectively without social contact. I personally prefer a central meeting point and face to face communication.
All I'm arguing is that in-person work is preferable by some managers and employees. I'm not arguing that it should dogmatically be applied to everyone.
From your hn profile, I gather you understand yourself to be a bit disagreeable,
> I'm opinionated, inconsistent, irrelevant, irreverent and incontrovertible
I don't see that as a problem myself but I wonder, based on this statement, whether or not you've found working in offices to be effective for you. I'd also wonder if you ever admit to being wrong, and how you react under those circumstances. I'm not convinced you could lay any and all disagreement at the feet of insecure managers.
I was later in their office on Hurontario near the 401 for a HackerNest meetup. I was speaking with a manager of theirs and mentioned someone who I knew that worked there, to find out he no longer did and he laughed about this person with a colleague.
I love hearing about a Canadian success story but their culture seems a bit off.
The Canadian and US labor markets are pretty interconnected so in my opinion these companies are going to have to start raising salaries if they really want to get talent. I feel like I read something on HN every week bemoaning the Canadian tech industry, when most of the problems have a pretty simple solution: pay more. Of course, that's easy to say but not necessarily easy to do financially.
Perhaps it’s worker protection that makes salaries lower in Canada? If it’s harder to fire people, that cost gets spread across all salaries to reflect the risk of having an employee you can’t easily fire.
Canadaians make far less than Americans even after accounting for the “benefits.”
I once saw a company looking to hire a senior rails developer at $25 CAD per hour. Insanity. I think it was even for a Vancouver company.
The US has a "payroll tax", which is paid by companies and is usually a percentage of the salary paid to the employee. You may not consider it a "business tax", but others might.
Also, some cities have business taxes on a per-employee basis.
Additionally, there is potentially a lot of variance in business taxes between one state/province/municipality and another.
Even in the US when you consider the whole instead of just Silicon Valley that is not a reasonable number to expect.
If Canada doesn't want all their CS graduates chasing the huge amounts of money they can make in the US, they need to raise their salaries. Otherwise they won't only face a tech-worker shortage, they'll have to deal with a full-on brain drain, which is even worse (of course, Google is expanding in Canada so hopefully this won't happen).
I'd love to a) know how to recruit good remote-capable employees and b) how to better manage remotely -- because at this point, we're going to open an office and hire locally.
Interstate taxation, necessary corporate filings/fees/forms, and offering healthcare in multiple states also make being fully remote incredibly difficult unless to restrict employees to being "remote" from the states in which you're already established.
but if business requirements, on the other hand, are complex, poorly understood or fluid, then developer will be absolutely lost and will start cranking up patterns instead of solutions. teamcity will be building alright and scrums will roll, but project will be a complete mess heading for a disaster. face to face will not save the day, but to some degree will mitigate lack of communication and understanding of common goal.
More to the point, if I'm willing to work and live in a smaller suburban area, why not just move to Waterloo?
His potential list of developers is much smaller because of his location.
???
I live in Port Credit (south Mississauga)... I can tell you absolutely that is not the case. Also it would be hard to name a culture that didn't have food here.
In Toronto, I am walking distance from everything after work, plus the subway to get me home. Port Credit may be cool, but it can't compete with that. Also, as you said that's south of Mississauga- again, we're going to have to drive everywhere.
That's just not there lifestyle I want, and very few in my office did- which was why we pushed so hard for a downtown office instead.
Five whole minutes, my word. Not sure how you survived as long as you did.
i hate commuting to downtown toronto, but it is hard to beat the Path, abundance of pubs/restaurants and constantly bumping into people i used to work with (aka stay in the loop). there is no fricking loop in mississauga.
It takes me about 5 minutes to walk from my desk to my car. Then another 5-15 minutes to drive for food. Then a minute or two parking and walking to the restaurant - if I'm lucky. If I wanted to go somewhere popular during the lunch rush, or that has shitty parking, maybe that's 5-10 minutes finding a parking spot and walking.
It doesn't seem like a huge deal, but it really can be.
I understand the argument in SOTIs case because their office is in the middle of nowhere, although there are restaurants very close to it.
that definitely makes sense; the only reason anything aside from housing exists in the Altanta suburbs is because of how long it takes to get anywhere more than a couple miles from where you live. Our company has an office in the midtown area, and the work schedule for a large part of the office is:
8:30 - 9:30 = work from home, fuck traffic; 9:30 - 10:00 = drive to office; 10:00 - 3:30 work; 3:30 - 4 = drive home, fuck traffic; 4 - 5:30 = work.
I can't imaging working anywhere in Atlanta that requires you to have your ass in the office at 8. I've heard people in Atl joke about how they used to be friends with someone that moved 10 miles away, and they can't hang out anymore cause it legitimately takes too long to get there.
I guess the friend thing kind of depends on which direction they moved in relation to traffic.
The TTC subway is hated here, but I love it. Commuting is a breeze, no effort, no stress, and I always know I can get home if I go out for drinks after work.
I met someone else complaining about this, that they hired everyone they could and were desperate. Their salaries were around $60K. Don't see how anyone can be scratching their heads over that.
This attitude has to change.
If a company can make significantly more money by hiring someone, then they should be aggressively increasing wages to signal to the market that they are serious. It's basically refusing to participate in the free market, or a complete lack of understanding of how markets work.
Business managers frequently act like they understand economics better than economists yet this attitude should telegraph a level of cluelessness that makes them unfit to manage a hiring process.
Everyone wants to pay less and get more talent. If you can't afford to pay more then compete on other aspects---allow remote work, more flex-time, and so on. Try something different in your interviews. Offer apprenticeships.
Sometimes it's not even a pure talent shortage that force increasing wages. In San Francisco the housing shortage and lack of support for new construction wipes out a lot of gains that come with higher salaries.
You can even see that problem get worse as people leave. Fantastic dev I worked with moved from Seattle back to India. She said that yes, she made more money in Seattle, but cost of living was so low in Bangalore that she effectively made a lot more money there. Coupled with her family being closer, it made perfect sense.
iPhones are cool, but houses are cooler.
(mostly joking)
And, from an investment point of view, maintenance may not be worth it if you believe that housing prices are too high and that a correction will be coming in the short to medium term. Why spend your own money on repairs if your house's value is going to tank in a few years anyway?
You don't give them enough credit. This process works for them sometimes. And sometimes is evidently enough.
Part of this complaining can be an attempt to influence/distort government policy, justify a flawed or exploitative hiring process, or managing who to blame when they miss a quota.
I definitely agree that what you said is part of reality for some companies, which is why I think it's important to aggressively point out that there are solutions when the "skill shortage" is brought up.
Additionally, if underpaying younger talent is prevalent, then all the more reason a company should offer competitive salaries to recent graduates when faced with a shortage. They'd start booking some easy wins.
And I say this as a Canadian.
Generally speaking, people need to start being more proactive asking for raises and switching to higher paying jobs if we want compensation in the GTA job market to improve.
The problem in Vancouver is that it often feels like any PHP jockey with 3 years of industry experience is called "senior". This doesn't happen in other market's I've experienced. It happens here because the Vancouver talent pool is very shallow. We have a very wide base of low skilled juniors and intermediates with a very narrow point of experienced senior engineers. There are far more juniors than there is demand for juniors so that pushes down salaries. Conversely, there is a lot more demand for seniors, real seniors, than there is supply in the local market and that pushes up salaries.
So it’s backwards. Canadian salaries should be a lot higher to reflect that they have a lower total employee cost.
One difference I can think of is that Canada has Universal Healthcare. Maybe the compensation system differs because Canadian companies can pay <Salary> and US Companies have to pay <Salary + benefits>?
(I mostly see people here on HN throwing salary numbers around, not total compensation. Also, I wonder if having the government handle benefits would make it easier to pay more (since companies don't have to pay benefits) or less (since companies just pay the government to do the benefits). )
What happens is simply that many Canadians like Canada and don't want to move south, and the Canadian economy is poorer than the American one (in particular, there is way less VC investment per capita), so companies have less money to fight over developers, and many developers (like myself) are content with this market.
I agree that Canadian employers can totally up their hiring game by upping the miserly salaries but they could emphasize the social differences between Canada and the US to attract risk-averse/future-focused candidates.
Also employers pay for your medical insurance with pretty good plans, if you have a medical issue your paying at most ~$5k and $3k/yr for family medical insurance.
So universal healthcare isn't a good enough reason to not move to the USA. Also the US might get universal healthcare in that time span.
I think my motorbike vs. Camry analogy is reasonable. Vast numbers of people ride motorbikes every day and live for decades without encountering a problem .Others can end up having their lives turned upside down as a result of some accident. A social safety net is not designed for everyone to bounce on but to catch the most unfortunate in society and help them cope as best as possible at their time of extreme adversity. My point is that the US, especially with the impending destruction of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid defunding, is about to lose its very short-lived and already weak safety net. If you can go back to Canada when adversity strikes, you are in good shape. Most people don't have that option.
My intent was to outline the fact that the US safety net is weak and there are plenty of corner cases that one could fall into from which recovery will be tough. Reduction in Medicaid will only worsen this. If you have coverage that you feel covers you in a majority of worst case scenarios, then you are in good shape but hopefully you are up to date on your read of the coverages. The Canadian safety net, in my opinion, saves one a little bit from this planning.
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-politics/2013/08/02/gr...
Though I'll note that the US puts a higher percent of GDP into public healthcare expenditure than Canada (yes, Americans pay more taxes for healthcare than Canadians, despite not having much public healthcare), so I guess the US is just bad at doing healthcare efficiently. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PUBL.ZS
I was answering the parent post on why salaries are not directly comparable in the US and Canada with one opinion, re. the healthcare safety net. It is entirely possible that having a sane immigration policy rather than the indentured sickness that is the H1B also leads to a healthier supply of talent and thus lowers wages. I am sure there are other factors.
Assuming that this calculation applies to your firm, are you going to leave profit to others when you could instead have a win/win situation for everyone (business, employees, customers) instead?
In the same vein, people aren't paid based on the content of the work -- they are paid based on market rates. Doing mundane work like fulfilling unit test contracts doesn't sound that valuable until there is no one in your geographic area that can or will take that job {in that place, at that time, with the legal ability to work, etc}.
Mississauga is no better or worse than any other suburb. The fact that you have to drive to get food, forces you to plan better and actually bring food into the office instead of eating take out all the time. In a way, that's a plus :-)
This perception probably depends on what life stage you are in: if you are single or married no children then "no after work fun" and "suburb hell" are minuses. Once you are "married with children" ;-) then those things stop being important as you have other priorities to rush to.
Canadian banks are horrid employers for software devs. I worked for RBC FG after having my first child -- e.g. time to get serious, etc -- and it was absolutely soul crushing. My pay was out of their bands so every year was a new middle manager making me and everyone else justify it, etc. They're always trying to replace you with either external solutions, or outsourcing. Peers at other banks have all the same impressions.
The Waterloo thing is just weird. No, not really.
And for what it's worth, of the programmers I've worked with, having spent years working downtown for both RBC and Bell, and then a number of smaller firms all through the GTA, the overwhelming majority live West of town in the "suburban hell". Increasingly pushing even further to Oakville and Burlington. Most prioritize positions to the West of downtown. And there is good food everywhere in the area.
This sounds like cutthroat capitalism to me. It's what happens to every industry when the margins are thin.
I suspect it will come to the wider tech sector sooner or later when innovation slows and VC capital dries up.
Then again, maybe some large corps will figure out that company culture, mental health, incentives, innovation, and creativity can be boosted by giving people some additional sense of job security.
I'm in my 40s, I don't care about after work fun. I HATE that I have to commute into the city every day.
I would LOVE a 15 minute suburban commute to work. If the pay/benefits are right the only big concern would be stability.
One it might say they have so much tech debt they need an army of programmers to maintain it. willing to bet good programmers stiff this out quick.
Second they are doing recruiting all wrong and/or have some senior guy that asks some dumb riddles and if people get it wrong or mess under stress they don't offer a job to them. I have been to so many job interviews like this in my career, where they have a programmer on staff with a huge ego and it shows in the interview. I never even entrain an offer if I meet anyone like this at all.
Third, which was cover heavily in comments here is salary and benefits. It isn't always salary either. I have take less money for more vacation time and other great benefits. I like to look at the big picture, not just the salary, as long as the total package is within the average.
Last and I think the most important is company culture. I think you can have all the others correct but if this isn't working great you will just keep losing people. It only takes one bad apple at the company for this to drive people away. This is the hardest to see and fix, especially if it starts from the top management.
This takes the "Fake it till you make it" mantra perfectly!
The important thing is to understand that and then use it to motivate yourself to work harder on your idea.
I sincerely mean "Well done" to Carl for what he has achieved, and how he did it, but I think that more than one person who reads this article will quit their job shortly and try and achieve the same thing to the same scale that he did. It is still somewhat a game of chance. Nothing is guaranteed. I've been there, and I know the scene well.
I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what makes someone succeed where others fail. There is an element of luck involved, but you can greatly improve your chances by doing things like working hard, understanding the problem you're solving, really talking to your customers, getting a mentor, saying no to distractions, etc. Those things wouldn't have any impact if it really was a lottery.
After three years I'm bound to believe in the lottery. Sometimes those calls do fall out of nowhere and dictate the survival or death of your company (so was our case).
Related to this, there is a Portuguese saying: "A sorte favorece os audazes", meaning: "Luck favors the bold ones". This was derived from the Roman empire, so for sure there has to be some reason to stick around for so long.
(As for execution that doesn't mean anything else that "it succeeded whereas others didn't" if one can't pinpoint a winning execution in advance).
Have done it two times so far, about to do it a third time (hopefully, with a different outcome). Wouldn't call it "failing".
The same impulsivity that made me JFDI also made me terrible at focus and operations.
Now I make apps that make toddlers giggle, work in an almost no-stress environment where people really do leave at 5pm, and get paid twice a month.
Of course, I still have ideas and side projects...
I imagine the advice would be to do what works for you with the hand you're dealt. The context sounds like part of the decision to leave his or her old lifestyle and start something with VR, but also why it didn't work out. Making apps and small games sounds like a third career after the JFDI one, but one without complaints, since it is pleasant and stress free.
1. Works in IT, daily faces all kinds of problems.
2. Quits job to make a software product
3. Suddenly realizes: I should make a product for the problems I faced back when I worked in IT!
I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the true circumstances of what happened here. But, it's much cleaner and makes it much more unlikely for his former employer to come back at him if the narrative is: "I left. I was struck with inspiration the next day" than "While I was working for this other place, I built a prototype that I thought would work. When I was sure it did, I quit."
Good to see a company with turnover in the $80M/yr range and still being 100% owned by him and his wife.
To me it would be more of a red flag if he was giving away equity because he would be giving something that he knows will never have any value.
This is done because even though the income tax rate is high, it is lower than getting double taxed (paying corporate tax rates plus playing capital gains).
So generally if a company is owned 100% by one person there are no distributions. This means for a company like this equity has virtually no value and profit sharing is a far better deal for everyone involved.
Since this company is 100% owned by Rodrigues, all of those events would require Rodrigues to decide to sell, or for him to die and for his heir(s) to decide to sell - all things that I would classify as liquidation events.
Maybe I am miscategorizing his viewpoints, but the article implied that Rodrigues doesn't plan on selling Soti.
So unless you are expecting Rodrigues to die soon I'm not sure what path exists for any other theoretical equity holders to gain any value from their equity.
Alternatively, employee pledges the shares as security for a loan and then defaults. Lender forecloses.
My point is this: there are ways for a minority shareholder to force a liquidity over the objections of the majority shareholders. Therefore those shares have value.
10x ARR + a bit for brand and goodwill. Its a stretch but the valuation seems about right.
I'm not terribly familiar with the product, but it sounds like Soti would be used to track all of these handheld scanners, possibly read what they're scanning and add it to the master inventory database, let the helpdesk reboot the device or push updates if something is malfunctioning, etc.
In the meantime, you end up reading posts like these from people who would rather think that companies don't just suck. It's really annoying, because it's not as if you can reveal the whole situation to people just to prove that their "No, no, companies wouldn't just act like that / be so mismanaged".
I think most people have worked at somewhere that sucked, but even some cases (e.g. Uber) can still make a lot of us step back and wonder how a workplace managed to become that toxic.
The reason it is a good approach is that; when you think about poverty, one may go round and round in circles trying to uncover a panacea but it all comes down to productivity. Are a group of people/is a person able to produce goods and services? This (ability) could be hampered by a lack of skills relevant to the current economic environment among other things. To acquire said skills among other inputs, one requires capital. If you consume capital goods, it won't be possible to save up enough to acquire the aforementioned production inputs. Systems like the Asian family-centric one you mentioned earlier allows for 1) creation of capital goods through production and 2) preservation of capital goods through savings and reinvestment over multiple generations.
If there's capital for future generations in such a family, then acquisition of the relevant skills in an economic environment that's constantly mutating becomes plausible.
It starts with a sense of frugality in a bid to amalgamate capital that can be compounded over generations in the future. Without capital generation and preservation (by the subjects themselves in order to cultivate discipline), you have nothing in terms of wealth creation and poverty alleviation.
What gets me is that these are always displayed first by the default "popular" sort even though they have no votes.
I prefer ventures that start generating revenue as soon as there are signs of traction (curious if this applies to ghafla in the early days). To this effect, I'm reminded of a story I read a while back on how tableau took on no external financing until they hit $100 million in revenue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericaswallow/2012/12/27/bootstr...
Here are a couple of others that followed the same route:
https://www.quora.com/What-great-companies-did-not-raise-ven...
That's like saying "Apple - A $700B firm built in a garage"
I'd like to know what the actual largest single-founder business is that's being run out of a basement
I don't know if a literal basement was involved, but Plentyoffish was solo for about four years and had a fair few users before hiring any staff.
Or Tech support? Like the Amazon Fire phone?