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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

It says on wiki:

In 2022, according to Forbes, the firm was valued at $1.5 billion, having secured $200 million in funding from venture funds such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.[1][2] It is remote, but is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in New York.

Why would such a seemingly simple product need so much money? It seems like the business was already done. Web video recording or facetime has been around a long time, but somehow this company carved a niche in a crowded market.

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They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time.

Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.

Very very well said. OP's vapid writing kind of tells the tale.

What does loom have anything to do with AI? It is a nifty way to share video recordings easily and quickly. In that they did a great job

>One video is worth a thousand words

>Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity

This is the first thing you see when visiting the website. Ctrl+F finds "AI" 10 times in the page. Like the other commenter said, it probably has nothing to do with AI, but this is what sells at the moment

It catered to the specific niche of screencasts and thus needed a lot of custom software written that doesn't already exist in Zoom/Teams. After development costs there's marketing/CAC costs to be considered. For those that don't "get it" upon seeing the product, you need to spend money on salespeople to convince them they do. After those expenses, their AWS bill surely wasn't cheap.

Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years. that's 20 million a year. say half on developers, that's 10-40 software developers all-in (meaning after HR and health care for them and everything). 10-40 people isn't all that many, though clearly enough to build the product.

Since the author of the blog post walked away with $60 million, it's possible they could have developed the product for less, but it's hard to argue with the results he got. Spending less money would have been penny-wise, pound foolish.

> Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years

You had me until this. Nobody is raising money to last ten years. You would be growing and want to raise in future years at higher valuations that incorporate all the growth.

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