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.
You still didn't explain why they need that many people.
What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.
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.
> 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, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
Depends on how they're running the company. Post-acquisition at my last startup it was much easier to keep our startup intact within the larger company.
Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
> I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people
Good thing I didn't ask you to.
> It says they had 3 product managers
Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow.
> I would guess this means 8-10 engineers
The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app?
> You've then got a [bunch of dept heads]
Eh, I can see those I guess.
> Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily.
OK.
> help centre and customer support
Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team.
> ops [and] IT support
If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
> Does that all make sense now?
No.
> there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly
I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users.
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Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
> If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
The needed headcount in both cases is nearly identical as well as quite significant at Vine's scale and with their type of product, and your assumption otherwise is a pretty clear indicator that you don't have much experience managing an operations team. That's okay, not everyone does, but you should listen to those around you rather than assume you know best in this case.
In operations it gets pretty tiring having engineers explain our role, strategy, and headcount to us, most particularly when this takes the form of criticism such as "you don't need a lot of [or have too many] people to do that," which comes off extraordinarily condescending and diminutive. The one thing that does not exist in all of computing, ever, from Joe's Web Design through Twitter and beyond, is a perfectly-staffed operations team. There is always more work than operators, and always "there are too many of you" sentiment. Always.
Sizing operations is an inexact science but one which yields "too many operators" approximately 0% of the time. When your operators propose dropping GPUs in the fleet to mine cryptocurrency as an additional revenue stream, you might (might) have too many. But not until then.
I'm trying to give you credit here that you mean well but the rest of your comment is somewhat suggesting that I shouldn't, so take it as you will, I suppose.
If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.
This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.
Please name a company of 10 people that manages a user base in the tens of millions with similar technical requirements as Vine (bandwidth, storage, etc). If such a company exists I believe it would be an outlier.
Are you really so blinded by free-market ideology that you think one company having bloated headcount makes room for a direct competitor in their product space? You believe in a perfectly efficient market and don't believe in the existence of barriers to entry?
But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).
My point is that your sarcasm was laughably bad. You came off like you genuinely believe that any perceived weakness makes room for a new company. Which is something people genuinely believe on this website.
If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.
Based on what PeCaN said, it seems he/she thinks that Vine is an anomaly, and uses a vast amount of resources compared to what is required.
I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.
If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.
For what it's worth… I /do/ work for a very efficient company, and benefit from it relative to our competition.
I'm not personally interested in Silicon Valley brogramming for social video sharing sites, but thanks for your confidence that I could dominate the market.
So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp.
It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
If there are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp I wonder why it's so difficult for them to continue supporting Blackberry 10. So what if it's not popular, they should aim for complete coverage of modern mobile OSes. Then again this is the same team that could not implement encryption without outside help.
Reddit is kind of a slow-burning tire fire. The site is down or responds with an error page frequently. They have no good revenue model, and they're too old to easily attract new VC funding. They're a small team because they don't have money to hire a bigger team.
