Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount.

> Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with around $2,000 in revenue for Fast.

I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue.

If you're surrounded by 100s of people at a company known to give high base pay but you're seeing daily revenue numbers in the range of $1K to $6K (they had $600K total revenue in 2021, supposedly) then you have to know that your time is very limited.

I assume they were led to believe that more investment money was just around the corner to keep the business going? With a $10 million monthly burn rate they would have needed a staggering amount of capital to just continue to exist, let alone execute any plans to turn the ship around.

Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc.

There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on monitors across the company.

Lol. L6.

Look no further folks. This guy Dominic was clearly LARPing a startup.

Leveling frameworks before traction is a joke to me.

Even startups benefit from job titles and hierarchy.

Even startup employees benefit from a visible promotion path. Remember, they had hundreds of employees. Not just a couple people in a small office somewhere.

Most likely, the levels corresponded to pay bands and helped determine where people fit into the seniority hierarchy (such as determining who receives sensitive daily information updates)

Levels before you even have product market fit is a joke.

Yeah that’s all fine and good but 6 levels is ridiculous for a new startup. My company has been around for 30 years, doing $75 million in sales this year, has 300 employees and we now have 4 levels, one more than last year, and even that feels artificial.

You are 100% right — for late stage startups where you would normally see 500 people.

At the Fast stage, the only viable promotion path is ship work that impacts the business or close deals that bring in revenue. The promotion levels game is something you play in larger organizations to engineer a rat race for people because it turns out they really like that. But no, a startup does not benefit from hierarchy quite the opposite in fact. That crap is all overhead it’s necessary as you grow but actually detrimental to your success.

they were a company of nearly 500 people. they had 150 engineers. At that stage people who don't have levels will feel like they have no direction.

This is just such a big company mentality.

Yes, you need like Engineer and Senior Engineer and then when you have some rock stars who actually move the business forward they are your principles and/or future directors.

To try to build this all up ahead of time, show me where it's ever worked? When Google was that size they were playing with having no managers at all.

If you're only interested in sniping FAANG talent, arbitrary levels provide a familiar comfort, and an opportunity to offer a level up immediately upon joining. "You're level L4 at Google, but we'll bring you in at L14".

>> * Fast hired engineers, engineering managers, product managers, and executives directly from Big Tech. Many of the software engineers joined from Meta, Google, Uber, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other well-known companies. Many joining had competing offers both from Big Tech and other high-growth startups.

Oh shit, there is no number in front of my name! What will I do with my life? The incredible vanity of it all.

That's what happens when you go on a crazy hiring spree.

I believe startups should implement levels once you hire 2 engineers. It's hard to retrofit a system, especially if you're trying to be thoughtful about any pay imbalances.

> startups should implement levels once you hire 2 engineers

I think OP is cracking a joke about a $600k company having six levels of hierarchy.

Here's my experience:

- When you hire, you implicitly put people in a level which dictates what you're willing to pay them.

- People will always feel underpaid, and demand more $$. Without a system, you give them out arbitrarily.

- You now have enough people to add structure to the process. Do you base people's levels on their current salary? On their skill?

- What happens when people notice the discrepancy in pay or skill among a level? Especially if it's skewed by race, gender, etc?

I think you should have as many levels as pay-bands in your startup, which might be 6.

Nobody wants to be a level 1. So the real level 1 was probably L4.

L1 is junior data center tech and junior helpdesk.

There weren't necessarily 6 levels of hierarchy (below the L6 staff). It's almost certainly for hiring purposes - to tell hires that their role is similar to that of a Staff Software Engineer at Google (i.e., L6). Like many things in tech, other companies tend to base their leveling system after Google, and you can literally put companies side by side on https://levels.fyi to compare per-level compensation at different companies.

I worked at a company where the founder manufactured an inane 13 level hierarchy (at seed!!!). We had two engineers, all level one, lol.

So there were 14 employees total, if I had to guess? /s

I completely disagree. They were 450 people with 150 engineers. If I had to guess I would bet the engineers clamored for leveling and it came from bottoms up requests and a need to be fair with compensation when hiring.

Now to be clear they shouldn't have been that big (clearly), but leveling people was not the problem.

That simply begs the question of why in god's name a startup with no traction needs 150 engineers.

Engineering is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding engineering. Continuously built self-scaling heuristic AI-based microservices that have full resiliency across four datacenters and twelve chaos monkeys.

Do not underestimate mans ability to overcomplicate things, when his continuing employment depends on him finding more things to engineer.

It's a recruiting tactic - to tell the FAANG engineer that they'll be as important as a Staff Software Engineer (L6) at Google.

That's really fascinating information.

Dashboards are all the rage as a way to get teams aligned around "critical numbers" (the metrics that matter).

But, if your dashboards start telling a story of impossibility, your best people are going to leave earlier rather than hang on.

A definite downside to the dashboard cult.

Is it? Maybe it's good if the decision to abandon ship is distributed over more people?

It hinges on one thing that I don't know: How likely are already failing companies to recover? Probably with the added condition that incoming help is not foreseeable, because if it's failing but people know help is coming that takes away some of the negative signaling.

I suspect that most of the times struggling companies won't get better, or at beast will continue to struggle and never make it big.

If that is the case, it will be better for both parties, not just the employees but also for the founders, if the life of this failed attempt of a business is cut short. I know first hand that when you are heavily invested pulling the plug yourself is really hard. I have no data, but I would not be surprised if the problem of staying too long - for founders too - is larger than the opposite, pulling the plug too early. Not that the latter is easy to show, since even if you get a large sample, you will never know for certain for many of the data points what would have happened if the plug had not been pulled without parallel mirror universes.

It's only a downside if the company's priorities are so completely misaligned vs employees' priorities. But at that point, I would call that misalignment the downside!

> staff+ engineers, eng leadership,

How does this even exist at a company with essentially no revenue? This should be at most 1 person in "staff+ engineers, eng leadership"

This is a hallmark of a scaleup which assumes it will become a massive company in a short amount of time, and sets up its structure accordingly.

There are times when a gamble like this pays off. Take how Uber built their organization and systems similar to how Google did it, even when they were smaller.

In the case of Uber, their approach, you could argue, paid off in the sense that Uber did get traffic that would have been non-trivial to handle, and complex business use cases that it could handle easier thanks to it's structure.

My view is that this approach is an all-or-nothing setup and it might end up poorly - and spending WAY more money than needed - than if taking it one step at a time.

Also note that Uber did operate in an environment when it could raise ridiculous amounts of money as it scaled up. This doesn't seem to be the case in the current funding environment of 2022, which has cooled down considerably from 2021.

Uber had revenue and millions of customers begging for someone to offer the service.

Google did not have "staff+" when it was starting out. It had founders and a couple of hires.

Great points on both. Uber, indeed, did not have engineering levels beyond senior engineer until year 2 or 3 as far as I know (I joined later, but talked with several early engineers while there).

I was trying to play devil's advocate but I have to agree that pre-product-market-fit, these levels are likely an overkill and distract from the real problem: validating product-market fit.

>L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc.

So all the people that have the authority and capability of saying "woah, woah, woah, we're building something far too complicated" had all the information they needed to prove it, and didn't. That's a fascinating sign of immaturity, and arguably incompetence, at some level in the org. The article points out engineers pushing up about scaling down infrastructure, but it's not clear if that came from the staff+ level or below (or both?), and leadership pushing back, or quite what.

Amongst a sea of negatives, that they continued to share these numbers with employees is a positive mark for the culture at Fast. Sure, it's easy to say with hindsight that Fast employees should have seen the demise coming. On the other hand, they also watched one of the founders raise $100M+ from Stripe. Perhaps they thought the burn could continue and eventually the product would reach traction.

The entire culture of b2b startups IME is "yes we're burning money now, but just you wait till Moby Dick comes along... just implement XYZ features marketing/sales says are important and we'll have him in no time!"

Of course, this is somewhat tautological: if they weren't burning money, they'd just be a company. Startup phase complete.

The difference being that in successful B2B startups you don't have 600k ARR at 500 employees.

> I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue.

My company posts daily new user signups in #general on Slack. That's not quite revenue, but you could almost extrapolate

By my back of the envelope calculations, they would need to raise about $10 million a month to sustain that burn rate.

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