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Comment by norman784 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com