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Comment by silax | Hacker News Reader

The best thing they could do at this point is give employees and investors their remaining cash. They won't, but I bet they'll wish they did.

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Why? Business will continue, they are just trimming fat (excessively) based on what the market is doing. Next 2 years might be rough, especially for ecommerce.

In general, I agree. But for Bolt in particular- they have a 2500x ARR multiple, and their top customer is suing them for "utterly failing to deliver on its promises" due to incompetence in software and lying about the details of their relationship, and the general sentiment of the company and founder is that of fraud, and the direct competitor just went out of business for very similar reasons, and the TAM of the market is less than they've raised in VC- I'd say the employees and investors can do greater things with the remaining capital.

Revenue looked on track for $20M ARR with no growth. About 500x at an $11B val.

But I think they raised about $1.3B, so if they recap at about that amount plus an employee pool, they can bring that multiple to 50x. This would wipe out the founders and early employees, leaving current employees some incentive to move forward.

Then, if the team can grow the business 2x, you are in normal-ish SAAS multiples. So it's not crazy. It could still work. A lot of pain.

Employees can move on at their choosing no? And the investors made a gamble, it's their own fault if they invested poorly. Now they have to wait (or at least play to the contract).

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