A possible brokerage opportunity would be to inquire with Carvana or Carmax if you can buy slots on their cross country shipments as capacity allows, and sell those to customers. You'll be at the mercy of their schedules and capacity, but could be a service tier along with other more "white glove" services (dedicated driver "hot shot", semi shipment, etc). You could also buy capacity on freight rail cars shipping back empty to factories (depending on destination and routing). High touch biz, beware, there be dragons.

I think the fact of the matter is, shipping cars is not going to be cost effective for an individual. Trucks are expensive, putting fuel in them is expensive, paying a trained person to drive one is expensive.

Maybe a company like Carvana could offer this as a side service, drop your car off at a local Carvana, and eventually pick it up at another location. Even then, I think the costs are going to be order of thousands of dollars.

Just need to use a direct carrier like Intercity, NOT a broker. Brokers have infested Google SEO.

As a consumer I'd assume there are hotshot truckers/services that would be used for this? People have mentioned similar "agent oriented" experiences with moving services and how it's opaque and unreliable.

You place anything you need shipped on there and various shippers can bid without having to go through a broker.

Do you want to foot the bill?

But the job is very high revenue (thousands of dollars per cargo depending on the distance) but low profit (5%-10%) in these times.

Same scenario for me - so I left - and then shortly after they did sell. Argh.

Wage labourers lose a lot of time and money invested as well, when their livelihood is taken away from them, do they not count?

Don't these sentences tend to contradict each other? What do you mean by "saturated"?

Running concern businesses don't have quite the same incentives nor the same risks of failure.

Cooperation of board/executives is not required but it is immensely helpful.

"The easy way" vs "the hard way."

On moral side: business in general (and startups especially) requires navigation between things many of which are unpredictable, and plenty are beyond your control. Also I've seen startups failing because of software bugs, and technical limitations. In this particular case, do you know about any obvious wrongdoing? If not you probably shouldn't auto-assigning blame on "them".

Because we decided ages ago that compelled labor is a bad idea.

another point, though, is the c-suite probably had more information as to how precarious the situation had gotten that the rest of the employees might not

[Edit] Legally how is it. Not just because it's commonly measured in months of wages

Why shouldn't a business consider itself at 0 operating dollars but still have a full account for healthcare or equivalent severance?

normally piercing the corporate veil requires serious executive misconduct.

Given Convoy's margins and operational leverage, I'm not sure it was this simple. Legacy freight brokers who have been doing this a long time are being caught surprised. They may have thought they had months of runway that rapidly collapsed to weeks.

We need stronger unemployment benefits. Barring a public solution, severance ensconced in employment contracts is next best. Convoy had nine figures of debt. Depending on the covenants, it may not have been able to hadn't over cash at windows to employees in the form of a novel severance package.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/fedex-s...

That's an extremely short horizon. Normally it's more than a quarter out, at least.

Startups on the other hand, (normally) must accept some risk of failure in order to have any chance of success.

So 46 days of gap between job 1 and job 2? Don't get cobra, just tough it out. If medical bills are >= 3k, then go ahead and sign up for cobra and get a chunk covered.

If your employer was paying $3,000/mo for your insurance, it's going to be $3,060 for you.

Fuck whichever lobbyists made sure that was allowable.

Edit: corrected per the reply.

Medicaid and CHIP: 85,614,581 people enrolled [1]

Military: 9.5 million people covered [2]

The US has not one but two of the largest single payer health insurance programs in the world.

Medicare alone has more people enrolled than any European country's single payer programs other than Germany (pop 83,294,633) and the UK (pop 67,736,802).

[0] https://medicareadvocacy.org/medicare-enrollment-numbers/ [1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica... [2] https://www.health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/MHS-Toolkits/M...

Re: medicare, I think a reasonable way towards universal single payer (or whatever you call medicare advantage plans, as a sibling notes) would be to drop the eligibility age over many years, and eventually get full coverage; and at the same time, add all kids to medicaid. Ex: years 1-10, reduce medicare eligibity age by 1, have medicaid cover kids less than year number; after ten years, medicare covers you at 55, medicaid covers kids less than 10. Years 11-20, reduce medicare eligibity age by 2, still increase kids by one year per year; after twenty years, medicare covers you at 35, and medicaid covers until 18. Years 21-28?, add medicare one year from both ends, and I think at year 28, everyone is covered. Congress should adjust the rollout schedule regularly, as scaling problems emerge, or don't; if after a couple years it becomes obvious that it's too slow or too fast, it can be adjusted; it'd also work, but be more complicated, to do it on a % basis --- once a year, determine what age (years + months even?) would result in a 1% enrollment increase, and do that, you'll finish before 100 years, but I'm not doing the math to figure out how much sooner.

Huh, what?

"In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill."

"Embezzlement is the fraudulent taking of property by someone to whom it was entrusted, usually involving theft from a business or employer."

I mean I suppose you could try to make some argument that it was an officially sanctioned company act, but that's definitely some post facto rationalization.

"’The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders"

Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me.

And not Fred's first or last brush with financial malfeasance, indicted for forgery over a $2 million loan from his family's trust fund.

I'm inclined to think 'selfish' much more than 'plucky startup founder'.

Again IANAL, and ymmv based on specific circumstances, but piercing for unpaid wages is very much a thing in (at least) California law.

[0]an obviously illegal activity?

> That is what happened to plaintiff Brett Voris (“Voris”) in Voris v. Lampert.

https://www.gmsr.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Kuang-Too-Ma...

...which is the same case I linked above. So the whole issue is how long wages can be delayed. If you're arguing that "Convoy management is unlikely to be personally liable assuming they didn't delay any wage payments whatsoever and their wage payment intervals are found to be reasonable by the court", then I agree. But it's rather common for some of these conditions to not hold, so the potential for piercing the veil is very real.

(Perhaps you are arguing against other people who think that unpaid wages are always considered theft, in which case I would agree with you. I was respondsing to the comment "you cant prosecute a dead entity for theft"; often you can, and it depends on the details, which I presume are not yet public for Convoy.)

My assumption was that we would not be talking about "unpaid severance" if there was no severance defined in the first place.

> Are you European? Maybe it's different there.

Generally severance is not legally mandated, but can be mandated under some specific circumstances, e.g. no-notice termination. Usually it is similar to US: either defined in collective (union) agreement or part of termination contract.

Usually severance is consideration for agreeing not to sue the company, not taking trade secrets, etc.

I am not talking about the case of of declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying wages.

With multiple “single-payer” systems in the same population (often serving overlapping populations with each other and private health insurance) you've negated that benefit.

You’ve also negated the market power advantage of monopsony purchasing by having multiple of them, and again having them coexist with private health insurance.

(And that's even before considering that while Medicare and some state Medicaid plans have single payer components, Medicare is not a single-payer plan covering the listed number of beneficiaries, but instead just under half are in the single-payer traditional Medicare, and that Medicaid isn't a single payer plan, or even a plan, at all, its a funding mechanism for state-operated plans, each of which may or may not operate entirely as a state-level single-payer plan.)

And Shkreli was moving money between companies and lying to investors, neither of which is relevant here.

More importantly, none of that explains what is sociopathic here.

> He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees.

But would it have been used that way? Or would it have kept propping the company up for a bit longer until total collapse?

> How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership.

I never said it wasn't reckless. But he got the business out of being screwed. If he failed, the business would have gone from screwed to... also screwed. What "do something right" do you have in mind that was so important it becomes sociopathic if he doesn't do it? And it has to be something that would have happened if he didn't gamble, but wouldn't have happened if he lost.

In other words, if your claim is right then there has to be a big human-impacting difference between the "he does nothing" outcome and the "he loses the gamble" outcome. And I'm not really seeing that difference. If both scenarios involve total shutdown and the only difference is a few days, that ain't it.

So yeah, if one thinks this is wrong, they need to take it up with their lawmakers. This is not something private companies can change on their own, otherwise all the well behaved companies would be much more likely to go out of business and only the poorly behaved ones would remain.

They used to have 1,500, before they laid off 1,000 of them.

If there are any outstanding debt obligations (which I expect there are), then those would be senior to voluntary severance even if the company hadn't spent its literal last dollar.

As such, spending your last cent to try to find a lifeline makes far more sense than calling it quits early. It's also certainly not in the interests of investors to just call things off.

Indeed.

"We hoped this day would never come. We spent over 4 months exhausting all viable strategic options for the business."

If it's not certain they are getting paid even while things are still working, how can you say he is getting paid after running out of money? Unless you mean "paid with worthless stock" in which case I would say "you can't fund severance and health care with worthless stock."

Think for a moment how far $260 million gets you when you have 1500 tech employee salaries in Seattle to pay. Plus operating expenses. Don't forget to add 15.3% for payroll tax. Median software engineer compensation in Seattle is 219k. Infrastructure and office space isn't free either. Seattle office space averages $43/sqft and the average employee space is 150-175 sqft.

That. Money. Is. Long. Gone. It's not a bad take, you just won't do basic math.

Raising $260M doesn't mean you're rich. The investors expect you to spend that money and otherwise why are you raising that much?

They spent 4 months looking for a buyer and had already shed 1000 employees before shutting down operations. It's not like current employees were clueless about what was going on.

Functionally there's little difference between operating up until now or giving 500 "chosen, lucky" people severance 3 months ago.

Now healthcare shouldn't be tied to employment, and it's not in my country. But this is the political choices of Americans in America. Not the fault of the individual companies who are subject to the system.

And you aren't being "let go" - the entire company is going under. If you are laid off and the company stays healthy, it makes sense to have some concessions. But if the entire business ceases to exist. I don't know why would you expect anything from it.

They want to be able to hire good people tomorrow so they pay you severance today.

The company in question here is dead. There is no more money coming in and no business to operate.

A lot of even large companies never leave the startup phase.

This might be true, but personally I'd rather the company try to remain a going concern.

It's pretty easy to say "oh you should have done this differently" with almost zero actual knowledge of the situation or experience.

Not surprising though, that Elon would be in the same camp as this Convoy CEO, not likely to shed too many tears over worker concerns.

It’s nothing like a layoff. For example, imagine that you are a supplier to company A and now your contract is both unpaid and cancelled and you’re going to have to lay off some of your own staff. Do you recover the contract money from company A, to give your staff severance? Or can company A stiff you and use it to give their own staff severance? (No, they can’t.)

A whole two people who claim to be ex-convoy employees have chimed in from what I have seen. Hardly representative of what the average ex-employee thinks. Certainly not enough to form a conclusion either way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

The directors had reduced expenses, had been seeking further investment, to increase revenue, and finally to sell the assets of the business, before voluntarily ceasing to trade. They executed their power and duties in good faith, with the care and diligence a reasonable person in their situation would have. It's not a crime to have a business fail.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/inside-qu...

As if a month or two of severance, which I'd wager your average critic in this thread would promote as laudable, would do much of anything in the grand scheme of job security.

Given the upside of a company surviving, or even ultimately succeeding, as an employee, I'd rather try to help a good/fair company ride it out and survive than folding early to pay out a few months.

Manic founders who insist that a rescue will come right up until the last second often leave people feeling burned and don't get as many second chances when things don't go well.

There is a big difference between a less than 1% chance and an 80% chance here. Part of the job is knowing that difference, and how to handle/communicate it.

But that's a bad thing - because once your employment tied healthcare abruptly ends, you scramble to get something to restore it.

This may include settling or taking less optimal jobs or accepting a lower paying job.

The risk to an employee at a company that got $250 million should only be accepting options that could be worthless in lieu of a portion of salary. There absolutely does not need to be any risk of losing healthcare, lacking severance, or any other loss of benefits. Founders want you to believe this but it doesn't have to be true.

Fortunately, there are many startups whose leadership is prosocial enough to try to offset some of the risk to its employees.

Since you seem like a Chicago School kinda guy, I'll put it in terms I think you can understand: employment is a market, and I am fortunate enough to have a optionality. It's bizarre that you fail to recognize that; it's pretty critical to your own analysis.

The only things that matter are cash on hand, burn rate and your ability to raise new money. Convoy's cash on hand was tiny, its burn rate was enormous and its ability to fundraise was zero.

These are the same types of people who think tech workers are treated so poorly that they need to unionize and should be free to spend their work time doing political things that have no contribution to the company bottom line.

It has nothing to do with negotiating the best deal for yourself. Severance is voluntary and is rarely negotiated up front. Especially at the level of employment for the 99% we're talking about where the company going out of business really matters -- negotiating severance up front is like negotiating a prenup. It's requires leverage and people in these income brackets don't have it.

It's swell when people gamble with employees well-being on the miniscule odds of a miracle. And even better idea is to offer severance, and those employees with the same appetite for risk can get additional options from the folks who leave. That'd be a win/win, except for the leadership who would rather gamble using other peoples chips but keep most of the winnings.

> Everyone who lost their jobs at Convoy is eligible for unemployment

Unemployment benefits don't come anywhere close to tech salaries! They take time to process.

> Perhaps the discussion should be around improving this benefit for everyone?

We can multitask. What is in my power to control is to avoid working with anyone associated with this decision and encourage everyone else to do the same - board-members and the entire C-Suite. We have a - let's call it poor culture fit

I think you can take out private unemployment insurance, if you are worried about that? (Or just have savings.)

Red herring

You're participating in mental gymnastics to validate what is essentially poor leadership. Why?

There’s no perfect set point and the trade offs will always have downsides.

Given the risks of working for a company in the stage Convoy was in I’m not exactly sure this is a bad outcome.

Convoy wasn't a pure software business. It didn't operate on massive gross margins; it was operationally (and financially) levered. Decades-old trucking companies are going down unexpectedly; I'm not sure why HN's armchair executives figure they could have called this cleaner.

Citation needed. Providing executive suite with bonuses and parachutes does. Indeed, even law firms talk about this:

> Severance payments to “insiders” (generally defined under the Bankruptcy Code as officers, directors, persons in control of the business, and relatives of such individual(s)) could be subject to lawsuits to avoid or clawback the severance payments.

Fraudulent conveyance, there. No mention is made of creditors issuing lawsuits against rank and file employees.

Indeed, even for severance payments that were never in employment contracts, courts place them at/near the front of the line in bankruptcy proceedings, witness Toys R Us.

But I'd be very curious to see any cases where creditors have been able to block severance payments that are not to the C suite.

But they are one! If those wealthy people were getting perks in this failure, the way e.g. workers at Good got screwed, I'd agree with you. But if you're running with massive fixed costs and volatile revenue, knowing whether you're weeks or months from shutdown is difficult.

And again, people are assuming if he shut down six months ago everyone could have gotten severance. Convoy is $100+ million in debt. Wages are privileged; new severance obligations are not.

> real solution is, and always will be, collective bargaining

The closer solution is civic participation. How many people in Silicon Valley have written to their state elected to raise unemployment benefits? (Note: I'm not saying anyone deserves what's happening. But union participation in America is stubborn and dropping. We need another drum to beat.)

tech is fundamentally incompatible with unions for several reasons:

  1. it will drive down the wages and give power to just another bureacracy
  2. Union participation does not differentiate between highly skilled (and sought after) tech worker, from mediocre tech worker who gets by using copilot and chatgpt
  3. I dont need union to negotiate with company on my behalf - I can negotiate by myself just fine
  4. If startup goes bust - I can easily find a job at another startup, probably will even get a pay raise - just because my skills are highly sought after and in demand. There is literally zero upside for me that union can do
  5. I dont want to share my specialist employee's power with faceless union burearacy

As long as I can opt-out of your collective bargaining (both as a worker and as a founder), I don't care what you bargain for.

Raising millions doesn’t mean making millions either. If you took a bunch of investor money and just paid it all out to your employees and closed up shop that’s a misappropriation of funds.

> Imagine if all the SWEs at all these VCs backed companies went on strike unless the laid off Convoy employees got six months of healthcare

Why would they do that? I’m not going to go on strike because other employees are incapable of understanding the risks of joining an unprofitable company that is default dead. If you want 6 months of paid healthcare, quote it and demand it as a signing bonus before you start.

Startups blow up. It’s your responsibility to prepare for it. Established companies blow up too. Sometimes you even just get fired because you suck.

SWEs have zero excuse to not have saved enough money to pay for cobra for six months if things fall apart.

Congress made secondary strikes illegal a long time ago. Maybe it would still be OK since that wouldn't technically be cross-industry; I'm not sure.

I'm saying it isn't that simple to project runway in some businesses.

> arguing against your suggestion that the employees without severance are going to be alright because they have severance

Sorry, we agree on this. This will suck for everyone involved. If it was preventable, that's on management.

> plenty if startups led by people who do right by their employees

When push comes to shove, constraints apply. Shutting down a start-up with cash in the bank isn't something that happens without a fight. There will be lawyers, possibly lawsuits, and delays. Convoy had $100+ million in debt; the employees would have had to fight claims of wrongful conveyance.

Put another another way: the CEO paid employees another few months' salary instead of handing that cash to its lenders.

No, I'm saying it's fucked this is the status quo across the country. Making severance--particularly in cases of business failure--the private obligation of the employer is recapitulating employer-funded healthcare.

(That said, yes. If you work at a start-up you should maintain a cash cushion if possible. That, and check your contract's severance terms and ask for them to be proper before the company enters shitsville.)

Typically in exchange for value and in Chapter 11, where you’re trying to preserve asset values.

> can't find any cases where unsecured creditors have successfully injuncted a bankrupt company from making severance payments

Senior unsecured. Higher priority than employee claims.

> mediators who were handling part of the bankruptcy proceedings

Mediation is voluntary. In the Toys ‘r’ Us bankruptcy, the original equity was wiped and creditors took over. They may have owned both debt and equity. But they were acting qua former creditors.

I’m not going to argue who would win. What I will say is the creditors would sue. There would be months of litigation, not a smooth transition to handing the firm’s last cash to employees. (Different picture had they never issued debt.)

Well this certainly isn't true. Hollywood has grown hugely over the last 20 years (with a massive crash during COVID):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office...

It looks like it is on track to recover completely this year:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/

It took decades from the demand was there until it became normalised to offer it, with concession after concession won as direct and explicit outcomes of industrial action.

That good conditions are offered far more easily when a working population is in a financial position to walk if it's not offered is entirely unsurprising and irrelevant. That you can't possibly win the same level of outcomes when the financial position of employers doesn't allow it is also entirely unsurprising and irrelevant.

Nobody expects magic. Nor does anyone suggest that there aren't other factors also at play.

Someone with more income might exchange more money for time/comfort, if all things are held equal including the price.

I think the inverse is true when you consider exchanging things other than money for more comforts.

That is to say, people will pay more money because they have more of it the higher their income (because the marginal value of each dollar goes down)

Asking would you be willing to risk your life for more comfort, that answer changes. The higher your income/comfort/happiness, the less willing you are to risk your life for more comfort.

The less people have to work, the less they are willing to risk their lives for more free time.

Who would risk death protesting for more leisure: someone working 80, 40, 20, or 2 hours?

Google search or chatgpt wont gonna cut it.

Same with tech - if you create a startup with big ambitions - copilot and chatgpt wont gonna cut it for your product.

and I see no mechanism for union to provide any value to tech workers. Hell, there is no even a category of tech workers: thousands of different specializations. I would never wanna be in a union with grandpas coding in COBOL for example

No, leisure is the normal good. And so is safe food and clean air etc.

> Given we can look back at history and see direct causal links [...]

How do 'see' direct causal links? Just because people work to achieve X, and then X happens, is not a direct causal link. Eg praying for winter to be over, doesn't mean that there is a direct causal link with spring coming eventually. And fans cheering for their sports team to win, don't have much of an influence on whether their team actually wins.

Or to give an example from history: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is often seen as the event that triggered the Great War; but few people assign it much importance as an underlying cause.

> I have no doubt you're right that it correlates neatly with different income levels, but I find it comical that you think that addresses the issue.

If income levels explain all the variation between countries, and levels of union activism are just noise, I am not sure why you need to appeal to union activism as a cause?

It's like looking at the correlation between taking antibiotics and recovery from infection, but then adding fervent prayer as a causal explanation for some reason.

The tide eventually receded from King Canute, but that's not because of anything he did.

EDIT: I mostly agree with your edit. A parasite should be careful not to kill the host.

You don’t know what demand means in an economic context here. Ops point is that as wages increase, people aren’t going to accept 70 hour workweeks if they can get by on 40.

> Given we can look back at history and see direct causal links between industrial action and subsequent improvements, there is no way to take this seriously.

Feel free to point them out and show how unions were required in every country to get the same thing. Things happening around the same time does not imply causation.

Union members were likely emboldened as pay increased because they could ride out strikes. At the same time, people could just get by on fewer shifts because pay increased. This creates downward pressure on required weekly hours (because many people to value their time), regardless of the union activities.

“The 8 hour work day was paid for in blood” is a great signal that you’re already very pro union (it’s literally union propaganda), so I don’t expect your view to shift much here. But consider that many professions flourished without unions (tech, law, banks, engineering, etc).

They are by no means requisite for improvements.