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Comment by jyriand | Hacker News Reader

Estonian startup Starship Technologies(robot delivery service) has laid off lot of people. How many is unclear. As I understand they try to stay afloat by using their robots for pizza deliveries now.

https://news.err.ee/1070009/starship-technologies-makes-redu...

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Interesting, as I surely thought they will be one of the companies benefiting the lockdown.

I think it's because most of their fleet of robots was focused on serving campuses.

That sounds consistent - before the radioactive mutant black swan of Covid they would make the most sense to serve as lowest risk of robot mugging and would need less battery endurance which is expensive and when done wrong attracts headlines as your bots catch fire in the streets - regardless of who is at fault there is no way to not look incredibly incompetent when your product immolates like that.

Probably most of the people they fired were "robot operators", who were paid ~3 euros/hour (~550/month), while their executives and high-levels make 5k to 10k a month net. Robot operators' jobs are to manually test or drive these robots.

- All salaries are net, after taxes - Estonian average salary is 1000 euros/month

I've heard that their executives/PMs are top notch, so 5-10k month net might be on the high side, but not outrageous IMO (assuming the Estonian job market is a bit more expensive than Latvian, which I'm familiar with).

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