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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

So I read their website and to my understanding, they make a DB interface layer, and have 100+ staff? How is this not a company of like 10 people.

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They have a ton of VC money to spend somewhere. The VCs get mad if you don't spend the money, it makes them feel like you asked for it under false pretenses...or if you are spending it too slowly, that you are not trying hard enough.

It does sound a bit inflated. Over the years though I’ve learned that whatever your engineering gut instinct tells you, you need to double that amount and that’ll be the actual number of people and then double to triple that amount in order to account for vacations, illnesses, maternities, people leaving and also having a new stream of people being trained in (not to be in a situation where someone leaves and no one to replace) AND then also add 10% of support staff or budget for external. This all without sales, marketing, etc.. that’s how easy it is to get inflated numbers, while it all still makes sense.

Obviously they have a bigger vision for the tool and needed people to make it happen

In all honesty, 100 people is not a big number, you need people like accountants, lawyers, office staff and so on

> In all honesty, 100 people is not a big number, you need people like accountants, lawyers, office staff and so on

I expect the bulk of those positions to be people trying to get someone else to buy the products/services they're selling.

In the end, it might really be just 10 guys doing the actual coding.

LinkedIn indicates 40-50 in engineering out of 164 total.

A company of this size needs 1-2 accountants and a part-time lawyer.

i have a company of that size (~100 employees, 60engineers) and we do not have a lawyer on staff. We have a law firm we hire for big things, and an old corporate lawyer friend on as-needed basis who does the small things. Done

Exactly.

100 people is a big number for a SQL transpiler with some SaaS "value add".

From a technological point of view I can't fathom how anyone would add this level of bloat to their project. Just write your SQL queries like a normal person.

for what its worth they are not "just" a DB interface layer. they are at this point or soon to be one of the most popular ORM in JS (~100% market share for new projects among early adopter types) and a cross-db "super ORM" at that (ya i know what i typed, i have my doubts too but hey that seems to be what people want).

also other features mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477321

I keep asking the same question about Vercel and no one wants to give an answer.

A company like Vercel needs significant infrastructure and the people associated with it, as well as supporting admin (HR, lawyers, accountants), proper customer support (for 24/7 coverage so that can be quite a lot of people), UI/UX people, documentation/education people, etc. etc. Of course also sales and account managers, presales engineers.

Just because you think you can make their product in a weekend all on your own doesn't mean that to get to where they are a ton of people aren't needed.

They're valued (Nov 2021) at $2.5 billion. They seem to have +430 employees.

At its core, their paid product is a thin layer over AWS and CloudFlare.

I'm not saying I don't like the product, I'm saying this doesn't make sense to me.

I agree it’s odd, and I’m not sure, but it feels to me like a big chunk of their staff might be involved with building Next.js and also running the annual conference of the same name which gets a lot of attention. I think maybe they see this as their moat. Any product that is just a thin layer around AWS is in danger of being suddenly eaten by a competitor or an OSS alternative or AWS itself. For Vercel, owning one of the world’s most popular web frameworks, which just happens to be particularly optimised for their own platform (both the deployment DX and performance), probably gives them a decent moat in that it keeps a huge number of devs around the world familiar with and positive about Vercel.

Probably sales/marketing/design.

They say GTM and it sounds like mid-market/enterprise sales. Scaling these teams requires a lot of support staff and if they’re ineffective things go sideways fast.

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