Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

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What a load of BS. So the message is what? If you blow through giant piles of VC cash spending money like crazy you can make some employees happy?

One gets to put out such puff PR pieces and be taken seriously if you're profitable, or even close to profitable. Then you're actually saying something. "Look at us, we run a great business and have happy employees." Otherwise, yes if you light mountains of money on fire some people will get a good ride out of it... until the cash is gone then it's a bloodbath.

Jet's business model is, well it seems they no longer have a business model other than seeing how fast they can burn cash. I wish them well, but seriously right now this company looks like a friggin' mess with no clear long term path forward.

I suspect that the goal is to be acquired by some big profitable company that wants to dip its feet into e-commerce. Or even being acquired by Amazon, which would probably want to eliminate all competition, even if its not profitable. The CEO of this company made a lot of money selling his last company to Amazon -- he's probably hoping to do the same here.

Perhaps, but that seems unlikely given their current play. The CEO previously managed to be a pain in the side of Amazon in a niche space and started a pricing war around that area (diapers for one). In the end, Amazon basically bled them dry and acquired them but at a relatively lean valuation in what was essentially an acquihire. In the context of this article, that accession didn't work out so great for most of the employees. That old company still exists within Amazon, but is mostly a mess.

Such a scenario wouldn't work out well for Jet employees in the current context either given the astronomical amounts of VC cash that were put on the table. Typically those VCs need to be made whole and then some before anyone else sees a dime. Given previous articles about Jet's fundraising challenges last go around and a market that's increasingly skeptical of lofty valuations with little substance it's not clear at all how this turns out well unless Jet can show it's a real business with real value long term and not just some crazy experiment in seeing how fast one can burn piles of cash.

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