1) They planned to spend 1/3 of their remaining cash on flying people around the world to meet f2f. Whoah! They need a CFO with some real power, because that is absurd.
2) Speaking of needing a CFO, one of the first things a CFO will probably point out to them is that their cash target is off by 100%. They're targeting hitting 50% of today's ARR sometime next year, yet they plan to grow ARR in 12-18 months by double. If they truly want 50% ARR on hand, they need to target $10M, not $4-5M.
I also have some questions about the graph -- I'm sure it's well-meaning but it looks fishy. The slope of the curve is noticeably better in the go-forward plan vs the status-quo plan, but there's no logic to support that in the post. I imagine there's a breakdown that makes this make sense, but it's not at all obvious, and the naive conclusion is that these people who were fired were actually slowing down sales somehow. Secondly, every time I see a graph where the next month is negative and then ... magic... and the slope goes positive, my spidey sense tingles pretty damn hard. That said, there are some obvious reasons this might happen, including the cost of the layoff being recognized next month, so that's less of an obvious red flag.
A couple of months ago they published a blog post which received coverage on HN talking about how they saved 120k by performing an audit of their infrastructure and killing unused AWS instances. It was obvious from the post that they were in the situation because there were no controls in place. And it didn't sound like they planned to implement any real controls going forward to prevent ending up there again.
Same reaction. They might be super transparent and everyone (in the comments at the bottom of the post) are in awe of it, but these numbers just make no sense.
1) They planned to spend 1/3 of their remaining cash on flying people around the world to meet f2f. Whoah! They need a CFO with some real power, because that is absurd.
2) Speaking of needing a CFO, one of the first things a CFO will probably point out to them is that their cash target is off by 100%. They're targeting hitting 50% of today's ARR sometime next year, yet they plan to grow ARR in 12-18 months by double. If they truly want 50% ARR on hand, they need to target $10M, not $4-5M.
I also have some questions about the graph -- I'm sure it's well-meaning but it looks fishy. The slope of the curve is noticeably better in the go-forward plan vs the status-quo plan, but there's no logic to support that in the post. I imagine there's a breakdown that makes this make sense, but it's not at all obvious, and the naive conclusion is that these people who were fired were actually slowing down sales somehow. Secondly, every time I see a graph where the next month is negative and then ... magic... and the slope goes positive, my spidey sense tingles pretty damn hard. That said, there are some obvious reasons this might happen, including the cost of the layoff being recognized next month, so that's less of an obvious red flag.