Walling: Bolt's 97% plunge left option-borrowing employees in debt after Breslow's secondary
Rob Walling · Episode 706 | 2/20/200 Validation, Prior Art, and Designing by Co... · Mar 26, 2024 · at 6:53
Rob Walling discusses founder Ryan Breslow and fintech startup Bolt as a cautionary case study of repeating historical mistakes by offering option-exercise loans to employees.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 25.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Giving loans to their employees so that employees could buy stock options, and then Bolt lost 97% of its value, and so anyone who took out loans to buy their stock options now owes the company money, sometimes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, this founder, Ryan Breslow, sold millions of dollars of his shares in secondary, so he seems to walk away ok.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rob Walling
Walling: The future of SaaS is still SaaS, not AI agents
“The future of SaaS is not fewer companies. It's a higher bar, and SaaS doesn't need to become something else to survive it. It doesn't turn into agents. It doesn't dissolve into everybody's weekend side project. It stays what it is. The future of SaaS, I belie…”
Building a social media audience is terrible advice for SaaS founders.
“There are folks out there who say, if you want to start a SaaS, just build an audience on social media. And that is some of the worst advice that I hear in our space. Don't get me wrong, an audience is helpful. It really is. But it's not worth the time that it…”
Walling: SaaS Founders Should Not Waste Time Building an Audience
“Don't grow an audience if you want to build a SaaS. Grow an audience if you want to do books and courses and sell events and do all the stuff I do. But if you're going to do a SaaS, there's so many better ways to spend your time, so many better marketing appro…”
Walling: Google will see its biggest revenue drop ever due to AI
“So my sixth prediction is that Google will see its biggest ever drop in revenue Due to the transition from 10 blue links being the prominent way people search into AI ads, and I think Google's gonna have a bit of time that they're gonna need to figure it out”
Walling: Bootstrapped founders using a freemium model usually lack competence
“Just bootstrappers using freemium in general usually means they don't know what the they're doing. Like that's been my experience.”
Walling: Twitter will be acquired at a deep discount in 2024
“The second prediction I want to touch on is I predicted that Twitter changes hands in twenty-twenty-four, question mark? And I don't know about you, but does it feel like the writing's on the wall? That Twitter is gonna be snapped up by someone at a deep disco…”