So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high.
The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?
And it was 118 at the time of layoffs, as you'd see in pretty much every article (and Wikipedia) talking about the topic. I can't exactly pinpoint how much they had when Epic swooped in, but even Bandcamp had a modest growth over the pandemic.
And my condolences for the editorial. I didn't even know Bandcamp had articles before reading this comment.
I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience.
However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly.
I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
Based on comments on HN, people are surprised that a company that "just runs a website" can employ "so many people." But this is a platform processing hundreds of millions of dollars among hundreds of thousands of users.
Here's a rough sketch of possible headcount. I'm making these numbers up, but maybe you can see how it does take a lot of work to make a business like this work.
- Engineering
- 5 - frontend dev/QA (web, tablet, responsive, A/B tests)
- 5 - backend dev/QA (app logic, video/content hosting, scaling up & out)
- 5 - payments dev/QA (payments is huge and complicated, probably a few payment processor partners)
- 5 - app dev/QA (iOS and Android)
- 5 - product owners (web, 2 apps, email, internal tools for agents etc)
- 5 - management (cto, engr manager, director etc)
- Business
- 5 - creator experience, patron experience, outreach, community
- 5 - marketing, advertising, lifecycle email and email campaigns
- 5 - partnerships, relations with big creators, collaborations
- 5 - fraud detection and remediation (fraud is huge, chargebacks are expensive, and the ability to charge $1 to test cards attracts fraudsters)
- Operations
- 20 - agents handling creator/patron requests/issues (more if 24/7 or multiple languages)
- 5 - ops/systems (keep everything running, downtime means less income)
- 5 - HR, recruiting, accounting, etc
10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?
Yes, 55 employees iirc. I don't think it was 'surprisingly small', though. It's just that cash-rich startups have had the habit of hiring as much as they could instead of hiring the minimum required, which is actually the sensible way to manage a company.
According to this article[0], product and engineering was ~150 people at the end of 2021 and they hope to scale to 400. Which...seems like a lot for what the company is? Although the hiring landscape has changed drastically in the last month so who knows how accurate that plan is today.
Having used twitter, I don't know what I don't know, but it's hard to imagine how the company could possibly have 7K employees. Maybe 500 to 1K seems more reasonable given what's there.
During 2017 they had between 130-170 employees but I agree that the amount of revenue for that period makes me think they started scaling without finding product market fit. $10m in revenue for that size of company is very, very bad.
This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.
Me too. I was very confused when I heard that number. I was thinking maybe 200 people if they have multiple dev teams and a corporate marketing/sales side for advertising.
My employer has slightly fewer people, but we have dozens of clients with sites/apps far more complex than reddit. It just doesn't make sense.
70 employees, of which 40 are engineers, is a huge red flag for a podcasting company. That doesn't sound like they're focusing on content, and what do 40 engineers even do?
Even with enough people to build and maintain a fantastic native app, that team size is huge.
Spotify had roughly 9,000 employees prior to the layoffs. What if they took the approach of X and let go of 80% of their staff - where would that put them?
1,800 staffers.
Just throwing this out there - I've worked for companies producing far more sophisticated products with under 500 employees in total. I'm honestly not understanding why you would need 1,800 employees - and that's an 80% reduction from where they were!
According to LinkedIn, Spotify currently has 13,900 full-time employees, with 3620 in Engineering (26%), 1850 in Arts & Design (13%), 1000 in Media & Communications (7%), and roughly 800 each in Marketing, Business Development, and Sales (5-6% each).
Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.
If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.
I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.
It's an interesting question. I guess they are mostly sales or support people, which need to be scaled linearly to a number of customers, labels, artists, etc.
I guess people misinterpreted the parent's statement. Spotify had 9,000 employees and downsized to 7,500. I think downsizing to 3,000 is a quite reasonable ask.
The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
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