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I somehow doubt Softbank had anything to do with the layoffs.
Although it seems that many Softbank investments may have layoffs as correlation rather than causation. They seem to invest in companies that will have to do layoffs when profitable growth does not materialize.
How has a mortgage lead generation site raised nearly $1bb? There is another identical site named lower.com (creativity must be prohibited in the mortgage space? At least in the insurance space they use random names like TheZebra) that has raised $100mm. They all _should_ have fairly favorable cash flows from the start, since there are dozens of potential customers in each market. All they need to do is get traffic for less than their price per lead*# of times each lead gets sold. I guess they're dumping money into traditional marketing and not really tracking their ROAS and going after mid/lower funnel channels?
Of course they are. And so are their competitors. So CAC is punishing. Lead sites are just renting Google search.
When 900 is 10% this means they had 9k employees before. Is that really a startup? Or more likely some reported numbers must be wrong.