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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

YouTube was 65 when acquired by Google.

Craigslist has 50 now, and had 28 as of 2009.

Reddit IIRC was 6 employees until they were spun out of Conde Nast in 2011. (Some of those early employees are on HN; maybe they can correct me.)

PlentyOfFish was one guy until 2008, 5 years after its founding. It was doing a couple million in revenue then.

The big labor-intensive function seems to be enterprise sales. If you're just building a product for people to use or charging self-serve for use, you can do that with a small engineering team. As soon as you start charging $100K for the product or ad sales on the product, then you need to start hiring people to convince customers why they should spend $100K for your product. Of course, each salesperson makes more than they cost, so it's still rational to hire them.

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I know some people like to hate on Joel but this article is as relevant as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

There is almost no software priced between $1,000 and $50,000. Only big companies can afford to pay $50k+ for software and as a result they want a lot of hand-holding, support, and customization. Because they're spending so much they also want a lot of CYA assurances. Let's also be honest: they also want sales people to buy them lunches and send them bottles of scotch.

Selling to enterprises for $15,000 is a great way to go out of business: you won't be able to pay for enough staff to keep the sales pipeline flowing and you're too expensive for individuals and small businesses no matter how much value you deliver.

I've never seen someone hate on Joel, but to me it would seem misplaced to hate on him, Fog Creek clearly know how to do enterprise tech.

The common element between all of these is that they are communities based around network effects.

In the case of at least the last 2 they also used community moderators which can be seen as a tremendous HR hack in some ways

Yes they were also not charging their customer and thereby had no reason to offer customer support. These companies are more of the exception than the rule.

All this, as well as integrations: if a company is paying 100k for your software, they are going to expect it to integrate with their existing stuff in various ways and you've gotta support that, and a lot of times that involves hiring "integration engineers" to support that stuff while you (hopefully) build those things into a general purpose solution (which is more difficult than it sounds).

A lot of times enterprise sales folks are not particularly technical, so they'll often request support from a sales engineering organization.

Integrations aren't just enterprise things, as well.

Consider if you wanted to build a Spotify competitor. Disregarding the partner management/sales/distribution side of thing, but sticking solely to the tech:

You have to be able to ingest content from all your partners. If a new song is supposed to go live exactly at midnight on a given day, you gotta be able to deliver that. Not just media, but also systems for ingesting, reviewing, and publishing the metadata, album art, etc.

You have to run on a lot of devices. You need a desktop or web app, an iOS app, an Android app, a bunch of living room apps, Chromecast support...

You have to be able to bill people. I'd suggest offloading as much of this as possible so you're not touching credit cards yourself, but then it's still integration work. And now you have paying customers so you're going to be expected to have good reliability and responsiveness to issues, and to build tooling for your customer support team.

Paying customers and inventory - even digital inventory - make things turn into a lot more work quickly.

> Reddit IIRC was 6 employees until they were spun out of Conde Nast in 2011. (Some of those early employees are on HN; maybe they can correct me.)

I wasn't that early, but I was probably in the first 30 employees, depending exactly how you count things.

There are start dates for most of the early employees in this file that used to power the (now removed) "team" page on the site: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reddit/reddit-plugin-about...

The "new" field in that file is YYYYMM data for when each employee started (though, looking through it right now, some of these definitely aren't correct, but they're reasonably close at least). Figuring out when people left is a little trickier, but estimates around a few significant dates:

* Acquired by Conde Nast (Oct 31, 2006) - 4 employees

* Independence from Conde (Sept 6, 2011) - 12 employees (including 2 redditgifts from that acquisition the month before)

* $50M funding round announced (Sept 30, 2014) - 58 employees (many working on redditgifts/redditmade)

* Steve Huffman returns as CEO (July 10, 2015) - 69 employees

* $200M funding round announced (July 31, 2017) - 230 employees

And they've said that they're aiming to get to 300 by the end of 2017.

Hopefully one of those new 70 employees will figure out what is wrong with their mobile site and is so slow.

They still have the working mobile site out there. It's accessible by visiting https://i.reddit.com.

Maybe they should direct to it instead of some full page banner begging me to use their poor app.

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