In general, I agree. But for Bolt in particular- they have a 2500x ARR multiple, and their top customer is suing them for "utterly failing to deliver on its promises" due to incompetence in software and lying about the details of their relationship, and the general sentiment of the company and founder is that of fraud, and the direct competitor just went out of business for very similar reasons, and the TAM of the market is less than they've raised in VC- I'd say the employees and investors can do greater things with the remaining capital.
Their valuation is a joke. Their software dev teams are tiny and opinionated. They keep losing money despite gaining revenue and losses are mounting. They're more of a professional services company at this point, without a product worth paying for. Best case, they'll be bought by VMware, RedHat or someone else, and gutted for the IP.
>But they do have capital, which they got by having a fairly good reputation from making cheap FPGA miners
The capital they have is from taking pre-orders and not delivering. They've also burned a lot of that capital spamming the internet with ads to sell more pre-orders. If they ever had a good reputation they have squandered it by letting their loud-mouthed-pompous-ass spokesperson loose on the forums.
When I see this kind of stuff I find them fascinating, because it's always the same story. People building a hardware product and then realizing that building hardware, even when it looks simple has a lot of moving parts. Coming back from that is quite impressive.
But when people boast about their amazing products to reek in VC money I actually get upset. I'm not sure if I'm more upset at the founders or the VCs though.
For example recently they have been raving about oxide, how amazing it is, how amazing the founder is, how amazing the idea is. But if you look at the website with all the ambitious goals and an estimate of early 2022[1] I can already see this company burning money like no other without ever getting close to that estimate. Either they have zero clue about supply chain or their wilfully misleading investors or a little bit of both.
I'm saying a double digit chunk of these companies' expenses and IP production is yielding no economic value: either through lack of product market fit or getting cancelled before they launch.
These companies are dripping with untrimmed fat and lack of focus on serving customers via building dumb projects that never get used.
Read through their GlassDoor reviews, it suggests they're an awful company on both the dev and sales side. And that means thatm at this point, their product probably isn't very good because devs keep leaving. Which means it'll be a mountain of technical debt to deal with and of course the inevitable, "omg we must have new features X, Y, and Z".
They're no longer a startup, yet they act like it. If they didn't raise more cash I would suspect that they would be out of business in a few short years.
I m in one of the companies they quoted as case study. The lies are so horrible I hesitate to do something: they fucked us completely replacing a wonderful github/teamcity combo, it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we're struggling just to do basic things.
I dont know what to do, but public investors should stay away: the product is not ready for people to pay for it. It's years behind the competition.
Downvoted but if it was a smaller startup trying to do something related to hardware they would be shorted to hell & back + would be the running joke of the year. "X is trying to sell secure VR headsets but they can't even work a security pass on their own building" and so on. See thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750894
They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had all this time and hired all of these people and largely kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements to performance or stability. Again, that's a market analyst's nightmare.
This is another company I have always felt is going to implode one day. They don't do anything that interesting let alone proprietary. The CEO is an ass and everyone knows it, he acts as if in an in-browser repl is going to change the world. I have no idea how their valuation is so lofty but the core tech is easily duplicated since a lot of the heavy lifting they used to do has become obsolete.
They've been in business for at least five years. They also decided to make a lot of noise about their Fortune 500 clients (multiple). If they're not well past "scrambling to succeed" then they failed on the business side as much as they did the technical side.
I am an ex QCOMer and agree with everything here. We always said it was a legal firm with a tech problem. That stranglehold on IP really holds the company back, IMO. Sure the licensing model made $$$ but they lose a lot of good will in the tech community.
But they are not doing it "extremely" well. It's shoddy, spotty, resource-hog. It's (is/was) innovative, but it's no longer an amazing added value over running your own (RocketChet) or picking a cheaper option.
I'll take the other side of that bet any day of the week.
I'm not disputing your assessment of the company culture or the VC fueled pricing. They're spot on. I just think there's no viable competitor (at the moment) to truly challenge them.
OR how about the super questionable culture of the company and its executives and leadership? Those are such red flags by themselves... This is a horrid company with a horrible past that wouldn't die because of VC money.
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