Bolt, the San Francisco Startup…Lays Off Nearly a Third

Sf Gate ^ | Joshua Bote

[Persevero]

The San Francisco tech startup that helped popularize a push for a four-day workweek in Silicon Valley, is now laying workers off.

As first reported by the New York Times, Bolt, the payment services startup with offices near San Francisco’s Union Square, laid off around 250 of its around 900 employees Wednesday in a move to “secure our financial position, extend our runway, and reach profitability with the money we have already raised” amid industrywide financial challenges, according to a letter to staff.

A Bolt spokesperson confirmed to SFGATE Thursday that "approximately a third of the company" was laid off.

[Noumenon]

"Extend our runway..."

Now there's a new piece of corpspeak babblecrap.

[HonkyTonkMan]

27 y/o CEO in over his head and full of startup lingo like “runway” and “superpowers.” The poster who said start-ups get off the ground with 90-hour workweeks is right. Can’t do it on straight time. I guess they found that out.

[Falconspeed]

“extend our runway”. Yeah, whatever.

[Myrddin]

I've worked at 3 startups. I was on contractor on two and had an equity position on one. The hours were exceedingly long. I walked away from the equity position (38,000 options at 9 cents that IPO'ed at $26) because 7 days a week of 14 hour days was going to leave me a rich cripple. At the 2nd one, I replaced 4 java programmers, 2 C++ programmers and 2 EEs. My lab had two people fabricating test hardware and 2 actively in the field running tests. 8 AM to midnight M->Sat. 1 PM to midnight Sun with time for laundry and the indoor range. The hordes of foreign H1B hires saw it as "playtime". The consequence is the fully scaled enterprise backends were not going to meet the drop dead date to send the 5 cars to manufacturing with a target production of 250,000 units. The sponsoring companies shutdown the work on missing the date. The 3rd one was a dishonest exercise from the start. The financing party was the US Democratic party masquerading as a union organization. After standing up a pretty kickass ISP, the "sponsors" insisted that the entire staff join a union or they would pull out. Fat chance. The staff were hand-picked, best in the business types that had no reason to be tied to a union. The "union" pulled out, but not before a big IPO and payday for the organizers. It turned into a shareholder lawsuit with LeRock leading the change. What a mess.

Suffice to say, these Bolt people advocating a 4 day work week were off in la-la land. Startups don't work that way.

[JerseyDvl]

But can the remaining employees still work 4 day weeks?

[Myrddin]

“Sure you can have a four-day workweek. Just be sure to get your 96 hours into those four days.”

At the startup where I ran the development/test lab, I literally worked 80 hours Monday through Friday one week. I then walked out and my wife picked me up to drive from San Diego back home to Idaho. I slept in the passenger seat until we reached Mesquite, AZ, then picked up the driving chores the balance of the trip to Pocatello. I put in that level of effort because I was turning over the lab for just test execution to an employee of one of the two sponsoring companies. All the development work was complete. That employee called me with a "heads up" that he suspected an "all stop" was coming. Spot on. The final slap in the face was a layoff notice via FedEx the day after the shutdown. My average 240 hours of labor was supporting a room full of idle people an my employer. The loss of the money stream meant I would get dumped too.

Postscript: facing a layoff and being a senior employee, it was up to me to find work. I did. I landed a $1 million contract. My former manager (the one who layed me off) said he "wanted a piece of it". I diplomatically said "F**k Off". You didn't watch me back.

[GaltAdonis]

First one went like this -

"But Mr. Galt - these software Engineers are graduates of one of the
most prestigious universities in China! Why all of the problems?"

"That may be true - but the problem is that most of them don't do s&*t!
They sit around all day doing nothing but talking (in Chinese) and laughing.
Frankly - I think they are telling jokes about you, me, the investors,
and America in general."

To be fair - two of the Chinese guys were quite talented and hardworking.
It's the other 9 guys & 1 gal who were not that were the problem.
I did as much of the work myself as I could - but -
I am not superman.

The story goes on - and I could also relate the NEXT story -
in which I had more authority and control.
We were attracting a bit of interest - then 911 happened.
The economy ground to the temporary halt, the investors
cut us off cold - and, you can imagine.

Tech startups are not for the faint of heart.
Nor the underfunded.

But I am sure you know all these things.

[Myrddin]

I was doing the lab project when 9/11 struck. The H1B employees were from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Korea and Israel. As the building burned on the break room TV, the Indian hires were concerned about how there stocks would be affected. The Bangladeshi seemed to know what was up and cheered. Big mistake. He realized that his life wasn't worth squat. He left and never returned.

At the same time I was in the lab, my son was a few miles south in bootcamp at MCRD. His decision to join the Marines went hot about 3 weeks shy of graduation. He finished his MOS school at Ft Leonard Wood, SOI at Camp Pendleton then his unit was directed to Kuwait. He landed on April 18, 2002 at the Kuwait airport. His 19th birthday. Many war stories followed. The good one is he came home and resumed life.

[GaltAdonis]

I got a late start getting out of my apartment on the morning of 9/11.
So when I was driving to my office in Reno, Nevada the two planes
had already hit the towers in New York.

As I was driving I saw quite a strange site - a small group of Hispanic
children walking down the sidewalk waving little American flags.

I thought: 'It's not the 4th of July or Memorial day, so what gives?'

When I got into the office I learned what had happened.
I got no work done that day. Spent the day scouring the
internet to see what was actually going on.

When I got back to my apartment that night, my next door
neighbor (who was a drinker) was screaming in a rage at the
top of his lungs: 'Kill Every Effing Muslim On the Planet!!!'

A woman I knew - who thought that there might be a nuclear war
and the end of the world - knocked on my door and propositioned
me right there. Crazy times, they were.

It was a few months later that the economic fallout of it all
caused our investors to bolt.

We continued on for about eight months more - but the situation
really got no better - and technology changed that would have
required us to make a major changes to take our product
and take it in a radically different direction that
would have taken an inordinate amount of time.
So we packed it in.

[Myrddin]

Sorry about the bad turn of events on your product. My first startup, First Virtual Holding, Inc. was the first secure payment system on the internet. We were very successful initially. It's the place I had 38,000 options @ 9 cents. What changed? SSL. End to end encryption of a web session to make a purchase essentially removed the fear of credential exposure. Today's PayPal follows the First Virtual model using e-mail address as the "VPIN", but employs SSL to walk around the confirmatory e-mail. C'est la vie! There is always a risk of a better mouse trap leaving your current work overcome by events.