Startups Anonymous Est. 2013 · Read-only archive
Confessions

The “startup” I work for operates on just shy of US$4M/year. Over half of this goes to the sales team and upper management salaries. We’ve been around for almost a decade and only generate $750,000 in gross revenue a year.

6 answers from the community

AAnonymous· Mar 20, 2014

Take the money while it's there!

AAnonymous· Mar 20, 2014

That is really all just a barometer on how valuable what your offering people is; that is what you should be most worried about.

AAnonymous· Mar 21, 2014

How does your company continue to survive after 10 years of $4.5 million in operating costs and $750K gross revenue? Sounds more like a charity than a business.

AAnonymous· Mar 21, 2014

Yeah there's something missing here. When was the last funding round?

AAnonymous· Mar 23, 2014

OP here. I wasn't on the "founding" team (which is two, four, or seven people, depending on who you ask) and poked around a bit. Our funding largely consists almost completely of "strategic investment" money from one overseas conglomerate. If our company fails, the investors get to take all of our code and database records. If we're successful, presumably, we'll just end up getting acquired by them, which is the same to them either way.

Put another way, while we do have a very few customers and clients and some contracts, our major "account" or "contract" is with a potential parent company.

AAnonymous· Mar 26, 2014

Leave and find (or found) a more promising startup.