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Comment by whatever3 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what has happened to the company behind Rome? Seems like all the employees have left

What I have heard and seems was considered "common knowledge" about a year ago was that the founder embezzled the money. His VCs considered suing, but decided it was just too messy. I'm not joking, something about some seriously extravagant vacations and a house renovation all paid right out of the company's bank account.

Any links to direct discussion of this (or sources)? All I can find is indirect evidence that they burned through vc money too fast

AFAIK they ran out of money and now the project is community driven, so no hopes to have the all in one tool soon

You have a source for that? Couldn't find a mention on their blog.

Is not an official source, but it seems that it is the case according to this discussion[0], searching in the social media accounts there's nothing, also Sebastian[1] didn't published anything more about Rome since December

[0] https://github.com/rome/tools/discussions/4302 [1] https://twitter.com/sebmck

They run out of money? I thought they raised like 5M two years ago and they had like 3-5 employees and pretty much 0 expenses outside of salaries.

According to HN, 1 good employee would cost you $1M per year, since everyone obviously lives in SV. 5 employees and that works out to 5M/year.

With payroll taxes and benefits, an employee is ~2x TC. Since startups underpay frequently, let’s say the average salary was ~150k in TC for early employees within SC. That’s 300k*5 = 1.8 million gone per year. Over two years that’s 3.6M. 1.4M left over for finance, legal, rent, and other expenses is kind of tight and you definitely won’t make it a 3rd without any kind of customers or other financial infusions. That’s why a company has to find some kind of product market fit quickly - you have to show there’s a there there so you could continue growing either through revenue growth alone or raising another round.

2x TC seems high. For one direct example I know of, benefits package (including all the insurances with all premiums paid by the employer) costs around $25k/yr. I feel like at $150k salary, it’s probably like $200k total cost? Payroll tax employers are responsible for seems around 7-8%. $30k benefits, $12k extra payroll tax leaves $8k for equipment and other expenses. That would be about $1M/yr for 5 employees.

Curious to learn more though.

I think the 2x number is a rough ballpark that includes total cost of employment (eg HR salaries / outsourced HR etc). It’s entirely possible that this overhead is smaller for startups and it may have shifted over time (this is a rule of thumb I was told by a few people 10 years ago)

Looking at the top contributors (https://github.com/rome/tools/graphs/contributors) that does not seem to be true?

It is Ireland, undisclosed (the founder, so probably SF), France, and UK.

How was Rome going to make money so that an investor could get a return on their investment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039330

They ran out of money after the CEO spent all of the money on...questionable...purchases. All of the employees were laid off with no notice.

Source on that? I can’t find anything and I’d be interested in knowing more, especially for the future prospects of the project

What did they spend the money on?

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