5 ms·

I similarly agree 5 is an absurdly low figure. Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15

I similarly agree 5 is an absurdly low figure. Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15 FTEs right there. BUT - i'm at a VC funded startup and can see how bloated these companies become whilst achieving not much. Our company got VC cash, then the VCs installed a CFO. First thing the CFO did was demote most of the engineering staff down to entry-ish level titles. Then came product managers, program managers, directors of product management, senior directors of program management, VPs of product, and C-suite. The Product:SWE ratio is 1:2 to 1:5 depending on the team. That is right, since we're falling behind on coding and quality, the obvious solution to hire senior people to go talk at conferences. Meanwhile engineering headcount and QA headcount barely moved. When product timelines and quality suffered, instead of considering why SWEs were demotivated, they hired more Directors and more Product Managers to micromanage and oversee the efforts. Except the Product Managers are remote and we barely ever hear from them. We think they are product managing their own careers mostly, we see more activity on their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts than we see on Slack. So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side. Next thing you have a several-hundred-person-startup producing about what you produced with 50 people Fuck me.

icedchai 6y ago
This sort of "corporate bloat" was incredibly common in the "dot-com" era. I'm not surprised to hear it's still happening. You gotta hire a ton of people to justify that VC money.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  ... especially with the VC's requirement to "grow". The small company focussed on their core service. The VC corp has to reach out to new markets, increase sign ups, please advertisers and produce shiny growth figured for investors. For users of the Meetup site it should be slim and I want to spend as little time there as possible (i.e. get invitation mail, ideally respond by mail, done) Meetup however wants me to "engage" trying to convince me to go to more meetups, rate them, comment, ... do as many clicks as possible while not driving users away ... all these deceptions take time to do, to try out, to A/B test. A committed founder who uses the site themselves notices where users got trouble and works on that. Maybe not in a team of five but also not hundreds.
mattmanser 6y ago
Err, Stripe? I've worked in a startup which processed 10,000s of different transactions from various countries around the world, we dedicated a whole 0.01 person to handling it. I think they were up to around 7 o 8 countries when I left. Had one full time dev and me a few days a week. As in it was checked now and then, and we had the occasional query once a month. YAGNI for a business like meetup. I don't think you realize just how much off the shelf, fire and almost forget stuff there is out there now.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  I wanted to jump on this bandwagon with my own experience. I worked for a software company about 4 years ago that had 6 people (including myself). Our company did $40M - $50M a year in revenue. No VC funding. We took thousands of transactions a month on Stripe and we basically never thought about payments. The software auto-handled collections or cut people off if they weren't paying (which in turn got them to pay-up). It automatically re-charged delinquent accounts, it automatically let people know that their card was about to expire, it automatically updated credit cards issued from banks (yes, really), and much more. We really never thought about payments at all. 90% of our transactions were USA, about 8% were Canada. And the other 2% was from Singapore. Never ran into any problem with these. 6 person crew generating $40M a year with no VC funding. It was all operated off the money that came in the door. It can be done.
  - hey_ya_23 6y ago
    >> 90% of our transactions were USA, about 8% were Canada. And the other 2% was from Singapore. Never ran into any problem with these. And I once ran a python script on my local computer and had no scaling issues. I dont know what all these people are talking about nginx, load-blanancers, blah! heck, I just used python -m simpleserver and Viola! it worked! See -- everyone can run a global business right from their macbook with 0 FTEs! I did it! (Please dont mind I picked the easiest script and conveniently based my business in places where Stripe works!)
    - mattmanser 6y ago
z3t4 6y ago
They are probably hired because of their contact network. As an engineer it might appear that new customers just magically show up. Depending on the sales model you probably can't just spend it all on ads.
Lazare 6y ago
> Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15 FTEs right there. I think you're over-estimating that by a factor of at least 15. If you're happy to say "let's just use Stripe, we'll support the countries they do, their payment forms are good enough" then that's like...1 FTE for a couple months to build your payments system, and then basically well under 1 FTE there-after to maintain it. You can absolutely find work for 15 FTEs working on payments (and more!), and you'll probably end up with a better solution too, but there's plenty of startups accepting payments globally with, effectively, 0 FTEs working on payments.
- hey_ya_23 6y ago
  Can all the US mom-and-pop websites collecting payments from US consumers please explain how they would proceed to effortlessly collect payments in Africa? The Middle East? Pakistan? This is an honest question, because I'm starting to seriously question my beliefs (I honestly though it was difficult.)
  - csande17 6y ago
    If people in those places have Visa/Mastercard credit cards, I'd expect to be able to charge them in Stripe just like any other card. Sure, https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global doesn't list Pakistan, but that's the list of countries your company is allowed to be based in -- your customers can be anywhere in the world. If people in those places don't have credit cards, I'd wait for Stripe to add whatever payment method they do use. (They've already added systems like Alipay and Klarna that are mainly used outside the US.) In the meantime, they can email me and we'll work out if they can mail me a check or use Western Union, or maybe I'll just give them an extended free trial or something. There are probably not so many people in the world who (a) don't have credit cards and (b) are interested in my software-as-a-service that I wouldn't be able to manually help them on a case-by-case basis. (Disclaimer: I have worked on a mom-and-pop e-commerce website, but it shipped physical products and didn't operate internationally.)
  - Lazare 6y ago
    If you're in the US, it just works; it's been a solved problem for, I dunno, decades? It just works with Stripe, and it just works with all their competitors. Check out their docs, it's interesting reading: https://stripe.com/docs/currencies https://stripe.com/docs/currencies What's a bit newer is that it's a solved problem for people in other countries too; 10 years ago or so I really wanted to process payments, but none of the easy payment processors supported my country (mostly Braintree and Stripe back then), so I had to go with eWay (awful) and a merchant account from my bank (double awful). The company I'm with now (same country) uses Stripe, and it's a massively better experience. (Not being a Stripe fanboy; they have some very strong competitors, I just happen to be familiar with Stripe.) Keep in mind: It matters where you (the merchant) are. Accepting payments from someone in Africa when you're in the US is trivial; accepting payment from someone in the US when you're in Africa is much harder. You can see where Stripe is supported here: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global (and most of their competitors are in the same or fewer markets). Also, there's still a lot of pretty bad legacy payment processors around, and they're often a fair bit cheaper. So if your company has been accepting payments online for twenty years, it may still be a pain for you, I wouldn't know. :) But yes, the mom-and-pop website in Topeka should be using Shopify or have paid a web shop to throw together something equivalent using off-the-shelf packages, and it should be using Stripe (or Braintree, Square, Adyen, whatever), and then yes, they can accept payments globally, and the experience will be really nice. It's not even any extra work; it just comes out of the box for "free".
rhizome 6y ago
Just based on your off the cuff description I'd be seriously thinking about jumping ship. At least update your resume so you don't have to when the day finally comes (either by your initiative or theirs).
- hey_ya_23 6y ago
  >> So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side. I'm not the GP poster but that sounds like a good deal. So collect a paycheck, nod during the corporate circle-jerk of design meetings for weeks while working on your own startup and side consulting?
  - rhizome 6y ago
    My ethics don't allow me to work at seemingly-doomed companies for very long after the realization that they are doomed.

icedchai 6y ago

This sort of "corporate bloat" was incredibly common in the "dot-com" era. I'm not surprised to hear it's still happening. You gotta hire a ton of people to justify that VC money.

johannes1234321 6y ago
... especially with the VC's requirement to "grow". The small company focussed on their core service. The VC corp has to reach out to new markets, increase sign ups, please advertisers and produce shiny growth figured for investors. For users of the Meetup site it should be slim and I want to spend as little time there as possible (i.e. get invitation mail, ideally respond by mail, done) Meetup however wants me to "engage" trying to convince me to go to more meetups, rate them, comment, ... do as many clicks as possible while not driving users away ... all these deceptions take time to do, to try out, to A/B test. A committed founder who uses the site themselves notices where users got trouble and works on that. Maybe not in a team of five but also not hundreds.

mattmanser 6y ago

Err, Stripe? I've worked in a startup which processed 10,000s of different transactions from various countries around the world, we dedicated a whole 0.01 person to handling it. I think they were up to around 7 o 8 countries when I left. Had one full time dev and me a few days a week. As in it was checked now and then, and we had the occasional query once a month. YAGNI for a business like meetup. I don't think you realize just how much off the shelf, fire and almost forget stuff there is out there now.

jacurtis 6y ago
I wanted to jump on this bandwagon with my own experience. I worked for a software company about 4 years ago that had 6 people (including myself). Our company did $40M - $50M a year in revenue. No VC funding. We took thousands of transactions a month on Stripe and we basically never thought about payments. The software auto-handled collections or cut people off if they weren't paying (which in turn got them to pay-up). It automatically re-charged delinquent accounts, it automatically let people know that their card was about to expire, it automatically updated credit cards issued from banks (yes, really), and much more. We really never thought about payments at all. 90% of our transactions were USA, about 8% were Canada. And the other 2% was from Singapore. Never ran into any problem with these. 6 person crew generating $40M a year with no VC funding. It was all operated off the money that came in the door. It can be done.
- hey_ya_23 6y ago
  >> 90% of our transactions were USA, about 8% were Canada. And the other 2% was from Singapore. Never ran into any problem with these. And I once ran a python script on my local computer and had no scaling issues. I dont know what all these people are talking about nginx, load-blanancers, blah! heck, I just used python -m simpleserver and Viola! it worked! See -- everyone can run a global business right from their macbook with 0 FTEs! I did it! (Please dont mind I picked the easiest script and conveniently based my business in places where Stripe works!)
  - mattmanser 6y ago

z3t4 6y ago

They are probably hired because of their contact network. As an engineer it might appear that new customers just magically show up. Depending on the sales model you probably can't just spend it all on ads.

Lazare 6y ago

> Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15 FTEs right there. I think you're over-estimating that by a factor of at least 15. If you're happy to say "let's just use Stripe, we'll support the countries they do, their payment forms are good enough" then that's like...1 FTE for a couple months to build your payments system, and then basically well under 1 FTE there-after to maintain it. You can absolutely find work for 15 FTEs working on payments (and more!), and you'll probably end up with a better solution too, but there's plenty of startups accepting payments globally with, effectively, 0 FTEs working on payments.

hey_ya_23 6y ago
Can all the US mom-and-pop websites collecting payments from US consumers please explain how they would proceed to effortlessly collect payments in Africa? The Middle East? Pakistan? This is an honest question, because I'm starting to seriously question my beliefs (I honestly though it was difficult.)
- csande17 6y ago
  If people in those places have Visa/Mastercard credit cards, I'd expect to be able to charge them in Stripe just like any other card. Sure, https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global doesn't list Pakistan, but that's the list of countries your company is allowed to be based in -- your customers can be anywhere in the world. If people in those places don't have credit cards, I'd wait for Stripe to add whatever payment method they do use. (They've already added systems like Alipay and Klarna that are mainly used outside the US.) In the meantime, they can email me and we'll work out if they can mail me a check or use Western Union, or maybe I'll just give them an extended free trial or something. There are probably not so many people in the world who (a) don't have credit cards and (b) are interested in my software-as-a-service that I wouldn't be able to manually help them on a case-by-case basis. (Disclaimer: I have worked on a mom-and-pop e-commerce website, but it shipped physical products and didn't operate internationally.)
- Lazare 6y ago
  If you're in the US, it just works; it's been a solved problem for, I dunno, decades? It just works with Stripe, and it just works with all their competitors. Check out their docs, it's interesting reading: https://stripe.com/docs/currencies https://stripe.com/docs/currencies What's a bit newer is that it's a solved problem for people in other countries too; 10 years ago or so I really wanted to process payments, but none of the easy payment processors supported my country (mostly Braintree and Stripe back then), so I had to go with eWay (awful) and a merchant account from my bank (double awful). The company I'm with now (same country) uses Stripe, and it's a massively better experience. (Not being a Stripe fanboy; they have some very strong competitors, I just happen to be familiar with Stripe.) Keep in mind: It matters where you (the merchant) are. Accepting payments from someone in Africa when you're in the US is trivial; accepting payment from someone in the US when you're in Africa is much harder. You can see where Stripe is supported here: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global (and most of their competitors are in the same or fewer markets). Also, there's still a lot of pretty bad legacy payment processors around, and they're often a fair bit cheaper. So if your company has been accepting payments online for twenty years, it may still be a pain for you, I wouldn't know. :) But yes, the mom-and-pop website in Topeka should be using Shopify or have paid a web shop to throw together something equivalent using off-the-shelf packages, and it should be using Stripe (or Braintree, Square, Adyen, whatever), and then yes, they can accept payments globally, and the experience will be really nice. It's not even any extra work; it just comes out of the box for "free".

rhizome 6y ago

Just based on your off the cuff description I'd be seriously thinking about jumping ship. At least update your resume so you don't have to when the day finally comes (either by your initiative or theirs).

hey_ya_23 6y ago
>> So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side. I'm not the GP poster but that sounds like a good deal. So collect a paycheck, nod during the corporate circle-jerk of design meetings for weeks while working on your own startup and side consulting?
- rhizome 6y ago
  My ethics don't allow me to work at seemingly-doomed companies for very long after the realization that they are doomed.