I have been working in HRTech for ~8+ years. "Most" of the tech companies operate that way - regardless if they are explicit about it or not. 9-Blocks, 360 degrees, etc are all exercises that have to fit a pre-defined distribution - i.e. "we expect at least 20% of the employees to be low performer". All the exercises of "team and department calibrations" are about to make sure the distribution fits the pre-defined/expected shape. Then some companies "act" on their low performers (stack ranking + policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% every year), some companies use perfomance-plans/other to "talent manage"
I guess "it's good". With the traction they were having, I think they could have raised more money and stay independent. So I don't think it's "it got scooped up", but more Trello decided to sell to someone they liked.
Love it. Mulesoft was a customer at my previous company and I always enjoyed working with them. Good luck for their IPO - it's a good thing for the ecosystem to see more tech companies going public this year.
The honest question is - how are they able to retain the 220 employees? I'd assume are very talented scientists, engineers, etc. Given this story has been going on for more than a year (or two), how do they keep people around?
I think Medium raised the $132M with the promise of "we will disrupt how news are produced and consumed". A monthly subscription of a digital magazine does not seem a so disruptive concept. The only disruption is to have people to write article for free while you charge for its reading.
This is an unfortunate by-product of the "Google" economy (better say, "VC" economy). Pricing, for the most part, is a psychological thing. When 99.9% of the web products are "free", a $9.99/mo product requires a lot of explanations. If every bar out there would give coffee away for free (to sell you ads in the bar), would you still justify/buy the $5.99 vanilla latte? Possible, but the market would significantly shrink. It also does not help that most of the SV "businesses" do not operate according to business metrics, but following vanity metrics - like monthly recurring active users per square feet (or, worse, by how much they have raised - i.e. debts)
It's somehow the prisoner dilemma applied to startups. I've raised ~30M$ as a founder in my past startup. For my next adventure, I'd love to bootstrap (with personal savings from my last exit). But here is the (prisoner) dilemma: if I start something that needs to be profitable and my competitor(s) are also bootstrapped businesses that needs to be profitable, game on. If my competitor is a VC-backed startup, I might be in serious trouble. So either I find an industry VC won't touch (porn?) or the prisoner-dilemma for startups is hanging over my head.
The problem is when you bootstrap your startup business, and your competitor is a VC backed startup. They don't need to think about revenue, they can build a product they give away for free - and you need to price it reasonably to pay salaries. Competition with a free product always leads to a race to the bottom. A few years later, these competitors will burn, but you cannot wait years to turn in a profit.
Yup, many organizations have this policy enforced. It'd be crazy to think a place like NSA would let you connect your USB stick to any of their terminals.
I think the problem is not much how do you store it once it is out. I have a cheap SAN bought on Amazon that handles 20TB. The problem is how you get 20T out of a place that has military-grade security. You cannot easily sneak a HD in or out - that will never pass a metal detector. You can have /some/ luck with DVDs. But if you take an average of ~5G per support (single layer DVD, to not make it fancy with a BlueRay, etc) and you get out one DVD per day, it takes 10240 days to move that data. That's a 39 years of data extraction. You can move many DVDs per day (risky), but unless you move dozens of DVDs/day, you'd still take forever.
The problem is not the existence of 5TB hard drive. The problem is how do you carry a 5TB HD in and out from a NSA office. The places are highly guarded, and they'll monitor for everything that comes in and out. You might have some luck sneaking in small devices - like pretending you have a commercial CD, but it's actually a writeable CD - but sneaking in and out hard drives it does not seem possible. And if you do it with other medias (CDs, DVDs, zip drive) it's a LOT of external media to carry around.
"Investors, according to the Wall Street Journal, will be able to convert the debt into Spotify shares at a 20 percent discount if the company has a public offering in the next year, with that discount rising two and a half percent every six months Spotify doesn’t go public.
Until then, Spotify will also pay a five percent interest rate on the debt. That’s an amazing investment for those who were given the opportunity to make it — five percent on their money up front, and a huge discount on stock when Spotify goes public. Essentially, if Spotify doesn’t immediately go under, they stand to make a lot of money on their initial investment no matter what happens."
Sure, but processes - like software - have to be designed for the right scale. The hiring process for a 15 people startup, is different than the 5k people company. At certain scale, things start to break. Imagine sourcers that need to reach out to candidates while (hopefully) don't reach the same candidate another sourcer, in another department, has reached out to. Imagine reaching out to a candidate who's already being in process or rejected. The recruiting team must be huge, and so the recruiting coordinators team.
I cannot imagine a sound hiring process to get 110k people in the door. Even if you assume a 1 to 10 ratio between interview-to-hire (that is low), it's a 1.1M interviews. Must be fun.
The question is, does he have the power to do this? It seems to me every time someone speaks up against him, he has the power to do damages - either by firing, cutting funds, banning the press, etc. My understanding of the "checks and balances" should be that not a single person - including someone as powerful as the president - should be able to do that.
For the tech industry, this is gonna be harder to navigate than the upcoming regulations on visas and h1bs. I don't even want to think about all the refactoring and rearchitecting to provide data segregation on multi-region. What a mess.
There is a reason why these companies have international branches. Talent leaders are always monitoring international talent pools. If they cannot provide enough supply for an office - and another office has enough of it, granted the quality is high - they'll just move the next projects to the other office. And smaller companies are starting to embrace remote work. So, no more borders and visas.
Meh. We were hiring people in US /AND/ abroad - when getting an H1b was easier and not connected to luck (= random lottery). Since H1b are hard to get now (= random lottery) we are only hiring abroad and remotely, but most likely not in US. I see more and more companies doing this.
Given this could lead to all sort of lawsuits, it's most likely they were looking for a "plan A" that didn't work and had to quickly unravel into a "plan B". Because they are shutting down, it's entirely possible the plan A left them without money in the bank and they had to announce it within the week (being Friday the best day for layoffs).
There's a part of me that "enjoys" this. When patents hit small fishes - like X-Plane - (and for no reason), nobody seems to care. When a $630B company pays too much in patent royalties, it's big news. Perhaps Apple could deploy parts of its capital towards changing the system, but for everyone - not just for their fees.