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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#51

Post by useful »

reza_n wrote: post #29
tyingq wrote: post #23

The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. Cloudflare's edge KV store and edge server-side JavaScript are obvious, but great ideas. The wildcard seems to be the companies that own cell towers. If they build a credible edge offering, that's a moat that is hard to beat.

Edge facilities are warehouses in regional locations with excellent backbone connectivity, basically your modern datacenter. Cellphone towers can probably host a few racks, that's not a profitable business and its not "internet scale". If the regional datacenter has a 15ms ping to each tower in the region, then you have pretty good coverage.

I think you underestimate what the edge will become. There are already startups trying to store your data at your house, cellphone tower, isp, etc. In ways where there is no central store or in ways that everything is eventually consistent. Computing at the edge is a very interesting topic.

Re: Fastly S-1

#52

Post by tylermenezes »

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.)

Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switched. I just tested and Cloudflare is still taking 48ms their own DNS server to resolve our Cloudflare-hosted DNS, but only 14ms for Fastly to establish a connection and send the first byte.

That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales.

I think their ROI is still too low for most small businesses, the only way that actually makes sense for us is because it's free for open source/nonprofits. But I can imagine it's a big deal for larger ones.

Re: Fastly S-1

#53

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ec109685 wrote: post #40
celestialcheese wrote: post #31

From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…

Those enterprises are re “-occurring revenue, so I am sure their LTVs are factored in with the spend.

Depends. If you don't get the "whole enterprise" the part of the enterprise you got could be easily lost because of a top down "everybody is going to use X" or "why do we have Y different vendors for Z?" type of situations.

Re: Fastly S-1

#54

Post by gmanley »

treis wrote: post #48
tyingq wrote: post #23

The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. Cloudflare's edge KV store and edge server-side JavaScript are obvious, but great ideas. The wildcard seems to be the companies that own cell towers. If they build a credible edge offering, that's a moat that is hard to beat.

>The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. IMHO, I think it's mostly a solution in search of a problem. The internet backbone is fast enough to not be noticeable for end users. A centrally located server in the U.S. will have a maximum ping of 40 ms to anywhere in the U.S. That's faster than is perceptible to the end user. The only mainstream usage I can see is cloud gaming where ping is that crit…

It may not make sense if all your customers are in the US but locations like Australia and others very much have an issue with latency. Especially if the server they are hitting is around the globe.

Re: Fastly S-1

#55

Post by stickfigure »

treis wrote: post #48
tyingq wrote: post #23

The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. Cloudflare's edge KV store and edge server-side JavaScript are obvious, but great ideas. The wildcard seems to be the companies that own cell towers. If they build a credible edge offering, that's a moat that is hard to beat.

>The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. IMHO, I think it's mostly a solution in search of a problem. The internet backbone is fast enough to not be noticeable for end users. A centrally located server in the U.S. will have a maximum ping of 40 ms to anywhere in the U.S. That's faster than is perceptible to the end user. The only mainstream usage I can see is cloud gaming where ping is that crit…

See also: Page takes 2500ms to render javascript.

Re: Fastly S-1

#56

Post by fasteddie »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #53
ec109685 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those enterprises are re “-occurring revenue, so I am sure their LTVs are factored in with the spend.

Depends. If you don't get the "whole enterprise" the part of the enterprise you got could be easily lost because of a top down "everybody is going to use X" or "why do we have Y different vendors for Z?" type of situations.

Sure, but that's factored into LTV calculations. If the average customer lasts 5 years before they churn because "Everyone is using X", then you get 5 years of recurring rev off that marketing spend.

Re: Fastly S-1

#57

Post by mxpxrocks10 »

tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

hi- curious about your completed sales stats. What are you selling? was it instant? was it gross top line?

Re: Fastly S-1

#58

Post by sjwright »

tylermenezes wrote: post #52

As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…

I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second.

How did you isolate the variables?

Re: Fastly S-1

#60

Post by treis »

gmanley wrote: post #54
treis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. IMHO, I think it's mostly a solution in search of a problem. The internet backbone is fast enough to not be noticeable for end users. A centrally located server in the U.S. will have a maximum ping of 40 ms to anywhere in the U.S. That's faster than is perceptible to the end user. The only mainstream usage I can see is cloud gaming where ping is that crit…

It may not make sense if all your customers are in the US but locations like Australia and others very much have an issue with latency. Especially if the server they are hitting is around the globe.

NYC to Sydney is still only ~200 ms. That's probably in the realm of being noticeable but only barely. Even then, the real need is more like one server per continent rather than every cell tower.
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