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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

they raised $355M this year and like $600M last year

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5/company_finan...

how can a company burn money that quickly so they end up with only 12-18 months of runway?

I shaved a bit off our AWS bill and my CFO at the time asked if it was worth my time. I asked him if he knew how you get a huge AWS bill with no idea how to fix? A little bit at a time.

People get lazy because things seem good and let questionable hires and other expenses slide by because why not, there's plenty of money.

see, that's why we don't use AWS

Toosh!

... I have to ask, is this some word I don't know, or is this a misspelling of 'touché'?

Is a real word apparently: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toosh

It's a joke from a, IMO, really funny show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bQMjmVmkF4

> I asked him if he knew how you get a huge AWS bill with no idea how to fix? A little bit at a time

But that doesn't answer his question. Was it worth it?

You get tech debt a little at a time, but it can be hugely valuable to leverage it for growth.

Of course there is more nuance than my short story implies. Just like tech debt, it's always tradeoffs.

Oh gosh… I feel this.

very broad strokes: money is raised to be spent. each round gets you to the next, or you reach some measure of sustainability before the money runs out — layoffs like this should be expected, regardless of the amount raised, if there’s a shift in conditions that indicate raising again in 18 months isn’t going to be easy. You can burn any amount of money if you want to.

Yes, regardless of Bolt's specific circumstances, this is on point. Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it. Especially for the really big raises, a big part of the motivation is that the company has made a case for how the large amount of money is going to be deployed very quickly (with the goal of generating returns). You don't take $900M of VC funding and stretch it out over 10 years, that's not what they gave it to you for.

Whether it's actually possible to usefully deploy all that money is another matter. Generally it's very hard. I only have an up-close perspective on one such large raise (that ultimately failed) but imo the reason they got the money was that they made themselves a credible way to spend so much so quickly.

>Nobody is giving startups money to sit on it.

Depends on the economic environment. We are headed for a difficult cycle. Downsizing and doing a raise to at least partially "sit on" might be the best strategy at this moment. Money flow can go from huge to nothing faster than one might imagine.

Neither the VCs nor the founders care about “sustainability” or profitability. They care about exiting and not being left holding the bag.

In the grand scheme of it, I haven't worked with that many, but every founder I have had the chance to work with has cared about sustainability. This is way more speculative, but I believe that sustainability goes out the window in favor of quarterly wins when the (co)founder steps back from their role and they transition to a non-(co)founder CEO and such.

I guess we could interpret that as the cofounder cares about sustainability for as long as it takes to hand off the bag.

Once the founder takes VC funding, it no longer matters what the founder wants even if that is true.

No idea. Confirmed the layoff number is 33% as of today. Which is pretty aggressive, they must be hemorrhaging money.

Engineers are expensive.

California is expensive

Cities with terrible home building policies are expensive.

Let’s not forget the high taxes!

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