This is a key observation. Every incredible team and inspirational idea eventually has to make the unit economics work. The longer it takes for a leadership team to realize this and prioritize it, the more difficult it is for people (ICs and managers) to internalize the changes that need to be made. Worst of all is when the shift happens because runway is getting short, and "get rich quick" projects become the focus instead of building a good product.
> ...you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises.
This sounds like a difficult situation, but is certainly something people should think about. Things can get weird when a company is running out of money.
Maybe unions and workers having more control could curb it? But in such a late stage it sounds almost impossible to achieve.
Cars are certainly a problem, but technology has by and far been a great thing, and I would question whether the gaming is really such a positive industry in the end either.
But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups. It only got worse in 2021 when MapBox's attempt to go public via a SPAC failed. They're plodding along now but it's hard to see what a good final outcome is going to be.
I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar.
This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it.
True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about.
I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.
Basically it happens when people start needing money for life, and that need becomes more pressing than idealism.
Consider the start of your career, maybe you came from school or college, probably you had _very_ low money needs. You may have had subsidised living (living with parents, student loans etc.). You live in a world where money isn't as important, you have no obligations, you are as idealistic as you'll ever be.
At this point your world is "open source" - everything should be free, make the world a better place. It's not hard to find like-minded people, join companies with like-minded founders.
But life happens. You have expenses. Relationships, kids, obligations. If you have employees you have to make payroll. Some might call it "growth" - some might call it "growing up" - really its just discovering (and losing) some of those subsidies you took for granted.
Crucially it happens at different rates for different people. So inevitably there's friction - this isn't the company I joined - and so on.
It's hard for employees to understand the pressures that come with being an employer. Pressures that lead to decisions an employer would rather not have to make. Pressure to make payroll. Pressure to somehow make it work. Seeing the car park and realise the number of people dependant on making that work.
To an employee every decision looks like maximising profit. And in some companies that is true. In others its about maximising income, income to pay everyone, income to keep the lights on, income to build reserves to weather the storms.
Employees have the luxury of quietly looking elsewhere. Once they're set then can simply leave. Employers don't have that luxury.
Unions, especially unions belonging to one specific business, not industry wide, are not a bad thing. But a seat at the table means understanding the responsibility of that table - and the need to satisfy the needs of all, not just your own. I've seen unions be a huge asset, I've seen them destroy factories and industries.
Yes companies pivot from open source all the time, because yes they need to "capture" value - because at some point costs, and life, catch up and unfortunately "giving it away for free" doesn't really pay the bills.
I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors.
It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.
Once you take VC, the goal of the company is never to make the world better or empower their employees. The goal is now solely to make money, by any means it can. The funders will allow you to do that ethically, at first. When you're not making their return as fast as they'd like, which you never will, the ethics go out the window.
I have observed many folks join startups as employees, take on risk without understanding it and without a clear benefit.
Imagine you've put your soul into it, and some years later they tell you that you can no longer pursue your vision and respect your users, and you're now a mere executor. Your opinion no longer matters, and the fact that you have one at all is a nuisance for the new management.
I personally don't work for the money, for me the money is very much a side effect of making the world a better place.
This is not true. Employees carry salary risk. For most people, unplanned loss of salary is catastrophic in the short-term.
1. Do I recommend the company to my network? I can make it a lot cheaper or more expensive to hire.
2. How do I spend my time? All my technical choices will make certain changes easier down the line, and others harder. I work hard to understand the business context & help those choices serve our shared goals, but the emphasis there can be on "shared".
3. How much do I streamline my own work? I can work efficiently, or I can wait for that build to finish and that PR to be approved and merged before I move on to the next thing. This can be a particularly effective way to incentive investment in a platform team & build tools, if I'm not allowed to just fix them myself.
4. What do I collaborate on with my coworkers? We can pick priorities we care about, and negotiate together for specific improvements. I've gotten more vacation time, better computers, bigger screens, paid on-calls and time to fix bugs all just by talking with people about what's hard about our work.
5. Insisting on pushing improvements to open source software upstream if we are going to use the libraries at all. The company could decide it wants to write everything entirely in house, but as long as we are using open source software I personally only make changes to it that we are going to push back to the community.
And I am sure there are more: those are just the ones I've used recently.
The point of VC funding is not to pay salaries, really. If you squint it seems close enough, but it sets a terrible precedent that most VC's wouldn't want: looking at venture funding as how the company pays its bills. That's a natural way to read your statement - but also counterproductive & undesirable.
The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale. Ideally the company could turn $1 into $1.25, before funding; that is, ideally it's making money. It should be able to pay some bills.
The VC funding is helping it to make more money, faster, and shortening the loop from sales -> payment -> expansion. It's helping it to leapfrog its competitors. That's what that money should be doing.
But what if it hasn't found product-market fit? Well, it's still not good to look at the VC's as "where our money comes from." That source is supposed to be customers, and you never want the focus to stray too far from there.
A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers.
I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.
My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust
You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
It's much simpler than this and it is about making money.
Whether unions impact the ultimate success (in terms of ability to build) of a company or not, they certainly shift the share of money that is going towards labor as opposed to owners who want a profit.
This lowers the expected return of company equity which means people will be willing to pay less and you will be able to raise less money while you are trying to scale up. A non-unionized competitor will be able to raise more money and if there are positive returns to scale, outscale & outcompete.
> It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
Yes. Or fight for workers' rights in the even broader sense (not just startups or tech).
Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.
Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...
Citation needed.
Unionizing by itself does absolutely nothing, and if I, as the employer, genuinely want the best for my employees there will be little friction even with a union.
I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred.
> "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union.
Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all stop working. If you want to run the company differently go setup your own company or buy some shares.
Unions in tech are as possible and necessary as unions anywhere else. Nothing about being it tech makes us "special" and the whole mythology it does only serves to keep us from organizing and solidifying our conditions and strength.
Contractors in minimum wage roles would be the only candidate for unions.
It’s amazing how easy it is for all of us to just take for granted that we are powerless at work and the only way to gain power is to create a company and disempower others.
Is it so hard to imagine doing it differently?
It is completely baffling that people who otherwise decry the government as a pack of dictatorial bureaucrats turn a blind eye when corporations internally act the same way, complete with lavish amounts of wasteful spending.
He clearly didn't want to go join another company – he joined Mapbox because he shared its early vision, and thought that original vision was worth fighting for.
The company raised a huge amount of cash and needs to make money to survive. The mistake was probably raising too much money.
So somehow, he thinks that the projects his colleagues „believe in“ are going to be more profitable than what they are currently working on. Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
And it’s important to note that while they raised and spent a huge amount of money, they sucked up all the talent and probably prevented other competitors from emerging in the space. So we shouldn’t feel so sorry for them. They were privileged to have so much money available to them when others didn’t.
But I won’t lie, it’s always nice to have VC money dumped into open source work while it lasts.
No it is not.
All stake holders matter. Some stake holders have power, some do not. Unions (when they work) balance that.
And yes, you're right - setting up a union is a hostile action towards owners of the capital. And we need more such hostile actions to give control over capital to the people who actually use it to produce wealth, as opposed to the moochers who collect economic rent from it by virtue of abstract ownership claim.
> A company like Mapbox hadn’t ever unionized before, so it seemed like an exciting experiment
Regardless of one's views on unionization, in this scenario as an underdog competing with 2 multi-trillion dollar companies in the space (Apple and Google), this "exiting experiment" reasoning seems especially reckless, irresponsible, and naive.
IMO, at such a small company like mapbox, it's akin to mutiny.
I would be far less sympathetic to the author if Mapbox avoided humanist language in their marketing and recruitment of personnel. But that's the language the company chose. Turns out if you say shit like "We are using technology to better the world" people are going to actually hold you to it!
Anyway, I feel like there's sort of this culture clash going on in the tech industry between Gen-X cynicism - where all that flowery humanist language is delivered with an unsaid "wink and a nudge" and millennial earnestness, where they take people at their word.
If you're a founder seeking to avoid this kind of stuff I would recommend not gilding the lily and be very up-front about what kind of business you're trying to build. Strip out faux-humanism from your mission statement and avoid it when recruiting. If the people doing the purchasing of your product are under 40 however you'll probably need to keep it in your marketing however. Do this in the beginning and not when you've already hired hundreds of employees.
I think this is why I can still sort of respect Amazon. They’re very clear about who they are and what they stand for.
It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves.
Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal:
The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking.
I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left?
We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.
To be clear, I did receive an offer and passed.
The whole story reinforced the idea that if you build a company with value but no profits eventually you either abandon it as a business or give control to VCs, and if you had any emotional or political investment in the company you will be disappointed.
For instance in some countries with stronger unions and better labor conditions the union often has a board seat and so can advocate and don't have by any means control over the directio of the company.
As an aside, I’m slightly skeptical about unions in the US. The US’s economic model seems to be based around innovation and unions arguably make making decisions slower and more difficult.
If you look at Germany’s economic model, one with very strong employee protection, it seems largely based on pre existing industries. Yet the US’s seems more based on innovation and failing fast. And German political culture seems more consensual compared to US political culture.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t think unions are possible or a good idea in the US—for certain industries I think they could alleviate the US’s problems—but I just doubt they’ll readily get government backing, support or favorable legislation in the short term.
I wonder how much additional stock the employees are buying with their paychecks…
It’s that belief that still keeps me from going that route even while working through a regular career for several years. If the project succeeds, well you’ve already sold it to the people who ru(i)n the world. Bootstrapping is so expensive but you diversify power in tech. Don’t sell out!
Call me crazy, but taking such a drastic move as unionizing shouldn’t be trivialized into just being an “experiment”.
EDIT: why the downvotes? Why not simply reply with your thoughts so that we can have a thoughtful discourse.
Until Boeing got taken over by finance people, the Boeing engineering guild had spent decades being a book club. It is only when things go wrong that unionization significantly changes how we work.
How is that not drastic?
You’re own words are saying unionizing is to bring in lawyers to be used against your employer.
EDIT: to answer your question below since I can’t reply.
No, it’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers. A company needs to ensure they are staying regulatory compliant, not breaking laws and de-risking company … that’s what the lawyers are doing.
Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.
Vector tiles, Mapbox GL, and Mapbox styling, and numerous other libraries however did grow out of Mapbox - the amount of geospatial developer talent they hoovered up must have made it pretty amazing to work at for a time.
How could you possibly come to this conclusion while on an interview loop? Did you sit in on all these meetings?
All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem.
Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc.
But once you’re a family or want to go somewhere low density and take some luggage, it’s hard to beat them.
What it looks like to me is this guy wanted to work at a geospatial PBC but didn’t know such a thing existed.
Do you have a reference for this? From a precursory search it seems the US has a much higher car ownership rate.
https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport... (2015)
The UK having the highest transit mode share (in 2014) is a bit surprising.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...
Japan’s strength is that you can take yourself everywhere daily on a train or walking/biking, and there’s density and malls in the train stations.
Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.
Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true).
I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
Browsing the old union website (https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/) almost all of the supporters of unionization were on the engineering side of the house, much more than I'd expect if you randomly sampled the org for job titles.
I wonder why that is?
There's significantly more tech talent out there than the business problems that can be solved profitably with said talent.
When the VC money runs out and the "growth & engagement" engineering playgrounds close up shop we're going to see a massive readjustment. We're in the beginning of it now.
And then end it with:
> "The skills and connections I developed at Mapbox set me up for a smooth and satisfying career transition."
So do you have a career or not?
I really hated it, but what could I do? I couldn't afford another car, so I had to live with it every single day. I'm guessing author feels something similar about having a career.
Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way.
Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.
> Technology is fundamentally neutral
It is in the same way guns are fundamentally neutral. You can't view it without context. Include that and it is clear that tech (or guns) isn't neutral at all.
Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model.
We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.
It seems so
https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/
Perhaps that's just their 'thing' for now and their core mapping/viz work will continue - I hope so as it's great tech and still relatively open compared to other cos.
Did they create products? Features? Internal tools? Design guides/system? Any actual work? Or just agitating for a union that their coworkers clearly did not want?
[0] https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c1...
Source: I overlapped with them for the first 7 of those 12 years, back to the <20 employee days.
There are many short term pressures on executives and finance people. Sharing power with the people their decisions affect leads to better outcomes for the business than when they use their power over workers for short term gain.
Unionization is how employees get a seat at the table and a say in the business they contribute their labor to, labor without which the business could not exist. Comp and benefits are only a component why organizing is important, in my opinion.
However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.
We are doing the "Tell me you haven't read the article without telling me you haven't read the article." kind of posts on HN now?
