tschellenbach

Nope, 600M in ARR, message bird is huge

We're hiring, but very slowly/carefully atm (https://getstream.io/team/). It's insane, similar companies to us used to raise $100-$200M with our metrics, at the moment i'm not even trying to raise additional capital. On the other hands it's nice that there is less hype and you can just focus on building and real progress.

If you want to find the optimal number look at how many hours startup founders put in. Incentives are 100% aligned in how they benefit from their work. They have no incentive to work less or more than the optimal number of hours.

Anyone else think that Meta will be next?

You could have made billions on the stock market by accurately predicting this.

It's good to see leaderships take responsibility and change course in the best possible way. But the whole this is our fault, we should have seen this coming story is a bit nonsense. They are just being nice about the messy situation and taking responsibility even though its outside their control.

We don't need messaging apps to interoperate. We need the notification center in your phone around push notifications to be amazing and centralize everything.

Companies pay employees to increase the value of the company. The market is reasonably efficient and companies will increase pay to match the value created (somewhat correlated at least. startups often pay more with the hope it balances out in the future, established companies pay less since some of them print cash and they dont have to pay more to get candidates).

Many tech companies are down 80-95%. So if you used to pay employees 100 to generate 100, now you are paying 100 to generate 20 or in some cases 5. This only works if you can massively increase productivity or reduce cost.

There is no evil conspiracy, markets are just down

Actually it can be either way: https://www.cooleygo.com/what-is-a-section-83b-election/#:~:....

Author here, this post is ancient by now. Definitely time for an update since people keep on posting it.

Go has been great at Stream. We are hiring atm. No go experience required and various levels of seniority.

As companies grow it becomes harder and harder to maintain a good culture, healthy team and high productivity. Google, Twitter, Facebook all have a reputation for some teams not doing a whole lot. Interesting how Microsoft, Amazon and SpaceX seem to avoid it.

That sounds fun, @tschellenbach on twitter or the email in my profile

This is the same approach that getstream.io (disclaimer, my startup) and agora.io take for video calling. A global edge network with support for SFU cascading is optimal for the call quality.

1. The existing team clearly has done a great job achieving this level of revenue with a small team. Be sure to compliment them on that and realize that they probably have a very profound understanding of how the tech achieves the business outcomes. 2. Start with source control 3. Build up test coverage, document and understand all the endpoints and what business outcome they achieve 4. Build some small things on a new tech stack to train the team 5. Move over everything when the team is ready

Our competitor is funded by SoftBank, fun times :)

At Stream with our team of 140 I like to share runway, burn, cash balance, revenue, burn multiple and CAC payback.

Historically Stream has grown rapidly and the equity grants have been very significant compared to the base salaries. (who knows what the future brings, but hopefully that trend continues).

So a significant part of our team's compensation is equity, I think it's only fair to be transparent about those topics. Also important to share the last round valuation and the revenue, since many startups that raised at too high prices are currently deeply underwater on their employee's equity.

We do lunch and learns on equity, evaluating startups etc. That is important since most people don't have prior experience with evaluating startups.

A friend of mine didn't exercise his stock options when he was early stage at a company that had an exit above 1B. I think that shows how hard it is to evaluate how startups are doing. But sharing the data is a good starting point.

They could. But if someone has a cost effective plan to improve security, that's feasible to execute, why would they block it? It doesn't make sense, security issues are important and can cause damage to the business. Their CEO is an engineer, he knows this.

It seems more probable that this security leader failed to get buy in from the engineering teams, or that there was some technical debt that he couldn't get past.

Zatko reported directly to the CEO, as a senior leader you need to take responsibility for your own work. Does anyone believe that in an organization as large as Twitter he didn't have enough resources to solve this? I imagine his budget ran in the tens of millions.

Why would you go into debt? Unless you borrow to exercise your stock options or get hit with the alternative minimum tax?

Well that's one way to wipe out your common stock holders. Later rounds probably have some sort of down round protection. So this is probably terrible for founders and employees.

Personally I'm in favor of remote work, but here's the opposing viewpoint: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1538182508310777857

VC funding enables the high salaries in tech. You can definitely be bootstrapped and work 4 days a week, you'll just have a hard time earning your current salary.

It does seem insane to me that healthcare is tied to employment.. that's just crazy

My first startup went through 2 majors pivots and eventually did quite well. The most valuable bit though was the experience. Second startup is in great shape thanks to that experience.

I think many founders give up too early. You wont learn if you don't go through some difficult experiences.

If this approach works startups will leverage it to gain an upper hand. We've seen this with remote work. Startups identified this gap and used it to outcompete other larger companies.

Personally I believe in remote and that it will get even better as tech to facilitate it improves.

I don't believe in working 4 days for engineering specifically. The field changes rapidly, there is a large learning curve and it takes a lot of hours to really master it. There is also some fixed overhead in communicating with other departments which stays the same even if you work less hours. So you remove more than 20% of your productive hours with this approach. You also reduce the time you spend learning. This further hampers your productivity. I think it will be a niche thing only done by some startups that care about this, have no other way to attract talent and aren't very ambitious.

That being said, for some people it will work well. It's pretty common for some roles in the netherlands for instance.

TL/DR: we pay lower than market rate salaries in all regions where salaries are high.

I do think that as productivity and tools improve around remote and async work salaries in remote friendly jobs will equalize.

I didn't cross post it. Think it's a content strategy for some of these sites.

Someone cross posted my content from 2017. It's been 4+ years.

Author here, funny to see my old post. Any questions about how we use Go nowadays?

Chiming in. I tend to work day and night to ensure a good outcome for our team, investors, customers etc. At the end of the day the buck stops with the CEO. Definitely the last thing you want for your team members.

The problem is that even if they run break even, all the shareholders and employees other than the last round of funding is still below water. They need to 10x to be somewhat fundable again, not at all easy to do.