> For senior software engineers, Fast offered $200-240K/year in base salaries

Lets put everyone there. $20k/month.

> On Monday, 4th April, Fast laid off all of its workforce of about 450 employees, of which about 150 were software engineers.

That 150 at $20k/month is $3M by itself.

The other 300... if they were paid half of that would easily be another $3M.

I'm certain there are other costs - but its easy to point to a "if they were paying that much, this many employees represents this much per month" that is a sizable fraction of that $10M/month.

It seems very hard to do but I worked at a startup in the early 2010s and we were spending >500k/m. We had ~25 employees, 7 of them execs, all buying new homes and cars, meanwhile we had 1 single paying customer bringing in 10k/m. I told some of my close colleagues that we probably had 6-12 months left when I put in my resignation.

12 months later they laid off 10 of the 12 remaining engineers.

Makes no sense at all. Presumably whoever is allowing people to be hired knows what the revenue figures are?

I suppose it's possible they thought there was some sort of dam holding back business, which was about to burst, thus requiring loads of staff to deal with.

But most people would just say "we'll cross that bridge when we get there" and allow a bit of queuing up of customers, rather than somehow hiring and training a bunch of people in anticipation.

It can be done. It's expensive. But it can be done.

You have 500 people and you spend 20k/month to employ each of them.