Seriously. Everyone here seems to think every business should be a permanent bootstrapped, profitable company. If you play the venture game, which Kraken is, you need to grow fast. Typically, though not always, that means hiring people to support that growth.

WhatsApp is the exception, not the rule.

This is hacker news after all, lots of us are hackers that prefer non-VC boosted (nor "cryptocurrency boosted") businesses that are run a bit more lean. Although, it used to be called "Startup News" but lets just ignore that fact for a bit so we can scream at bloated companies for a bit longer.

HN thinks a junior developer bootstrapping a webapp over the weekend is production ready.

npm install crypto-exchange

And those other 29 people are just there to ask me dumb questions.

I mean HN runs with like three dudes.

People have no trouble understanding why Walmart has 2.3 million employees - because they roughly understand “each store has X”.

do they have pages for comments yet

Kraken had ~$1 billion in revenue last year.

With 3,700 employees, that's a revenue-per-employee of $270k.

If you are a startup, that is ok, maybe even great!

If you are not a startup, and are in tech/finance that is NOT OK.

Kraken is not a startup.

Of course, my context is the tech sector and not the scammy free-for-all that is crypto, so I may be off-base.

Their RPE is more like a struggling, dingily-lit, zombie chain of brick-and-mortar retail stores than it is a tech firm.

I know HN doesn't like metrics like RPE, but they're never wrong.

edit: just looked it up. For comparison, Binance has around 6,000 employees and around $20 billion in annual revenue which is off the charts in terms of RPE, even for oil and gas. That's a sign they need to hire more.