Was it necessary? Probably not. But I found the in-person time valuable, especially with teammates I’d never met face to face.
Source: I was there
He phrases it as due to redundant overhead for cashapp and square, plus a move to smaller, flatter teams as a result of AI. Not saying he's going to be right just that they're profitable and I believe this isn't a money thing.
The crucial point is, was it an unnecessary expense?
Calling an all-hands a party without any supporting evidence feels willfully negligent.
A lot? Not a lot? Don’t know anymore.
Bringing a remote employee to SF just to work out of an office for a few days can easily cost a few grand.
It doesn't seem excessive, the networking in these things is often really worth it
Hosting in-person events for 10,000 people is expensive even without having to transport and house anyone.
The Tweet extrapolates to assume that the entire difference was due to the event and calls it a "party"
Even if we assume 100% of the increase was due to the event, that's about $6800 per employee, or about a week or two of pay for developers.
This includes flights, lodging, and food for remote employees. That adds up fast.
This is just Twitter ragebait.
I did the other math assuming it was 100% for the in-person event anyway.
Edit: never mind, the report clarifies that without the party expense G&A would have been flat YoY.
Side note: I have no idea what Block does and why they need 10,000 employees anyway.
Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall.
Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done.
From Wikipedia:
> In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]
But anyway, as others have said, the tweet seems outrageous at first, but at $6800 per employee for a multi-day offsite, with hotels, travel, etc included, it doesn't seem excessive. I'm sure their salary for that month was significantly higher.
That's the big bet software companies are making right now.
Data $150
Rent $800
Party $68,000,000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my company is dying
Just put in my mind by the grift and corruption posts that are currently trending on HN front page right now.
No first hand experience ... just anecdotes and some news reports.
"ok.. but was it a party for all 9,000 people?"
"maybe they had great caterers"
... then I did the math. It's $7.5k per employee.
Clearly I'm just not creative enough to know how to waste money like an SV company.
> The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe.
So that'd make it 8.5k per person. Building stages, paying permits, hiring acts like these, I bet that's where it mostly went.
Running events is expensive when you have to fly your remote employees in and house them for multiple days.
How is the competing narrative of cutting teams that were working on non-core or experimental projects falsified by any of this? Why wouldn't they put a brave face on that and chalk it up to AI? You can see how the stock market has rewarded it.
