If you ignore the fact that it's actually a full e-commerce platform, and ignore the machine vision categorization ("AI") and augmented reality aspects to their product, you also have to realize it's not a site, it's an ad platform that does probably just shy of $1B in annual revenue. Not so simple!
It's also not just some "site" that has a dev team of maintainers. Houzz is a full-on sales and marketing corporation. They'll likely be 2,000 employees soon. Only a small fraction would be software engineers (my guess, probably 70 growing to 100). There are likely a few hundred employees in the sales organization. A sizable marketing team. Maybe 500 account managers. A design team. An operations team. An editorial team. A non-trivial HR and recruiting team. An administrative support team.
At a guess, $400M is probably one year's payroll expenses for them.
I have no affiliation with Houzz and am actually ambivalent about them, FWIW. Just wanted to demonstrate that these things aren't so simple.
If you ignore the fact that it's actually a full e-commerce platform, and ignore the machine vision categorization ("AI") and augmented reality aspects to their product, you also have to realize it's not a site, it's an ad platform that does probably just shy of $1B in annual revenue. Not so simple!
It's also not just some "site" that has a dev team of maintainers. Houzz is a full-on sales and marketing corporation. They'll likely be 2,000 employees soon. Only a small fraction would be software engineers (my guess, probably 70 growing to 100). There are likely a few hundred employees in the sales organization. A sizable marketing team. Maybe 500 account managers. A design team. An operations team. An editorial team. A non-trivial HR and recruiting team. An administrative support team.
At a guess, $400M is probably one year's payroll expenses for them.
I have no affiliation with Houzz and am actually ambivalent about them, FWIW. Just wanted to demonstrate that these things aren't so simple.