Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

>>> ... in purchasing SoapBox for the entire company. They’re an old school business. 500M Revenue and 23 people.

Err, wow. that's 20M per employee ... I am astounded - is that real? 100,000 to 300,000 is common in consultancy style services, I mean even Google has ~100k people on ~100bn which is 1M per person

So really 20M per employee is stupidly "out there".

# google numbers - yeah ok I mean Alphabet, but more accurately 90k people vs 110bn but few years ago it was 40k vs 50bn so not changed much - ratio of about 1.1M per seems consistent - and Google is rinsing the productivity making the 23 people at 500M seem even more ridiculous. Maybe some obscure fintech? maybe big revenue low income? would love to know more

View on HN

> 100,000 to 300,000 is common in consultancy style services

Sure - it’s a very different business model. It’s far easier to put more people on the project than convince clients to pay more for top talent.

> I mean even Google has ~100k people on ~100bn which is 1M per person

And how many of those people contribute directly to Googles main revenue source? Only a tiny fraction.

Google is not optimizing for max revenue per employee.

It all depends. Instagram was ~13 employees when bought at $1B. WhatsApp was like ~30-40 employees and bought at $19B.

Neither had revenue so it is not comparable.

I agree it would be interesting to know more.

Top line revenue is difficult to compare across companies in different industries. The top line revenue at a small car dealership may be much higher than a similarly-sized software company, but the margins on that top line revenue are grossly different.

Yeah topline revenue in this business was not how most businesses here look at revenue.

Also it was the ceo telling me. He could have lied.

The margins were very very different

Revenue, not profit. Their margins might be very slim.

1MM+ per employee is common in some industries; finance and energy being two examples.

In Energy the number is missing the huge amount of temp workers that the industry tends to have

The same could be argued for any number of companies that don't "do all the work." For example, Apple doesn't manufacture phones; Nike doesn't build their shoes.

That isn't that crazy though.

Hedge funds can make 100s of millions per employee.

I suspect Google COULD make much more per employee. But by 10xing their staff as they have over their last few years, they can maybe 1.5x their revenue. Sounds bad, but at the end of the day it is still a lot more profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com