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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Which is perfectly normal between businesses; pay $90MM to get rid of a $440MM lease contract. Heck, as a consumer, if I want to get rid of my car lease I need to pay a hefty penalty as well.

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The notable part is not that they had to pay it. It’s that they chose to pay it. It reveals the magnitude of shift to WFH.

Assumption: same performance, increased employee satisfaction, lower costs, fewer expenses (company and employees).

Companies now just need a skeleton crew for IT Ops, HR, Accounting.

Especially for companies like Pinterest that have probably seen their revenue explode, it's a win win win.

Has their revenue exploded? I thought advertising revenue was down this year.

Etsy & Pinterest are both public companies and this info can be found in their quarterly filings.

TL;DR Yes, revenue has increased. Etsy is spending very strong in advertising with Pinterest getting large amounts of it.

Disclaimer: Position in both companies.

Actually it seems to have flattened off:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/995107/pinterest-quarter...

I didn't entirely write what I meant correctly.

Etsy's revenue has greatly increase: https://www.statista.com/statistics/409407/etsy-quarterly-re...

A lot of Etsy's money did go to advertising. This has ended up in Pinterest's pocket. The fact Pinterest is flat during covid and entirely being an advertising company I consider still growth of revenue. The global advertising spend has greatly decreased, it'll eventually pick back up.

But, yes, you are entirely correct, on a direct statement level, revenue is flat.

For a company to pay almost a hundred million dollars to not rent office space in downtown SF, that's the abnormal part, compared to 2010-2019.

Are you suggesting they would have walked free between '10-'19 ? I am quite certain they wouldn't have.

10-19 they would never have got rid of space - and arguably other potential tenants would have paid them to relinquish their rights

Exactly that. They could have easily found another renter/sublet it for no money lost (potentially even gained) those days.

Yep, one company I work with closely made something like $16M through subleasing or leaseback (I forget the exact arrangement) in early 2019 after they decided to reduce their office footprint.

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