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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#131

Post by Jgrubb »

kyledrake wrote: post #127
Jgrubb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the card rate. Their bigger customers aren't paying that.

It's part of why I don't get it. Large companies have multiple competitors to negotiate with, driving down prices (and this does not look to change anytime soon, it's dropping 40%/year for transit). We're talking about an S-1 here. Where's that growth going to come from? Cannibalizing Akamai is not a long term IPO strategy.

I agree re: cannibalizing Akamai and I don't have any inside knowledge at all, just a fan of theirs and the last two companies I've worked for have both been customers. There's the security/WAF stuff that could be hugely lucrative for the larger customers that decide that's a priority. There's also whatever future potential edge computing/serverless ends up having. They're already kind of perfectly positioned to ramp that up if they want to.

I think the easiest short term play is the loooong tail of CDN business that's out there that never would've bothered with Akamai because it's too expensive. Their partnership and bizdev folks are really smart about reaching out to small and mid market PaaS providers to set up coverage for all of the sites under their management. It only takes a few of them to take off in their niche to add up to a fairly significant amount of revenue.

unrelated: I'm a fan of Neocities, thank you for that :thumbsup:

Re: Fastly S-1

#132

Post by wongarsu »

jjeaff wrote: post #112
wongarsu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A few 10 ms makes no difference. About a 1-2% difference per 100 ms seems well supported (e.g. [1]), at least if your page load time is already low enough. 7% is very high, but some effect is expected. 1: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w...

I don't buy it. So what you are saying is 2% for every 100ms. So that means if we decrease page load time by 1ms, then we should expect to to see .02% increase in sales? So if we do $10m annually, 1ms decrease in sales should boost sales by $2,000! We would all probably agree that 1ms will make no statistical difference. The problem with these studies is that most are dealing with much longer load times. Like 3 secon…

Yes, the 1ms will likely be statistically insignificant. But so are $2000 extra income out of your $10m. If anything, you have a better hope measuring the 1ms than the $2000.

I agree with your larger point that average latency is not a good measure. Even for the perception of a single user consistency is more important than a good average. For large groups the average is even less useful.

But intuitively I see lots of places where 100ms makes a world of difference. Just like there's a big, very perceptible difference between a 200ms animation and a 300ms animation, a time to full render of 200ms can change your experience compared to 300ms. The slower the page load, the more deliberate your movement. The closer you get to 16ms (1 frame) for a page load the smaller the investment for clicking a link, and the higher the willingness to experiment and explore. Some of that inevitably leads to conversions and sales.

Re: Fastly S-1

#133

Post by madeofpalk »

xfitm3 wrote: post #49
tedk-42 wrote: post #42

/* Work for a Media Company */ We're looking to move one of our sites off Akamai mostly for costs reasons. Fastly configuration in Varnish VCL - Senior Engineers from my company highly rate Varnish as a cache software so Fastly was an easy choice. I believe Akamai have been our CDN from the start. The amount of reconfiguration we'd need to do to get everything off would create a huge number of tickets in our work que…

Fastly’s major advantage is near instant CDN config changes, where Akamai can take an hour to push a new cdn config.

Is that an actual advantage though?

Re: Fastly S-1

#134

Post by lapnitnelav »

cagenut wrote: post #117
treis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your numbers are wrong but your line of reasoning is actually the basis of how Fastly's network was designed to be different from Akamai's. There's a graph about it at the 2:40 mark in this video: https://vimeo.com/132842124

That presentation was refreshingly honest and interesting to boot with.

Re: Fastly S-1

#135

Post by Rafuino »

I'm not experienced with S-1 filings, but don't they usually include the share price targeted and amount they're looking to raise? It's blank up top on the document right now. When is that typically filled in?

Re: Fastly S-1

#136

Post by pbreit »

Rafuino wrote: post #135

I'm not experienced with S-1 filings, but don't they usually include the share price targeted and amount they're looking to raise? It's blank up top on the document right now. When is that typically filled in?

Not until closer to the IPO date after investors haven been able to make an evaluation and been pitched by company and bankers.

A 7x multiple on $140m in sales might suggest around $1b (divide that by # shares to get a possible share price).

Re: Fastly S-1

#137

Post by edmundsauto »

treis wrote: post #126
edmundsauto wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. This is easily possible if you have a highly distributed customer base, and/or some small segment of your customers don't have good upstream peering with your provider.

>A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers. Which is why I asked the question in the way that I did. I buy that a slimmed down webpage loading 10 ms faster on average will increase conversions because that makes the site usable for the visitors on bad connections. Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the…

> Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.

I think this is where we disagree. I've seen (firsthand and through analytics) situations where using a CDN can dramatically improve response time in a small subset of customers (while also getting the across the board win for most customers).

I've also seen CDNs (Amazon's in the early days) that were signficantly slower than direct to linode, even with a warm cache. It's a weird world, and packet routing is hard.

Re: Fastly S-1

#138

Post by zackbloom »

nyc_pizzadev wrote: post #122
useful wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For an edge to work, you need security. That means transport encryption which requires certs. I think this fact alone will keep the edge at modern secured datacenters. There is limited physical security at cell sites. Even less at the users home. This could mean there is no more transport encryption for this kind of edge. Or even worse, private key loss. Not saying no here, just pointing out a very large concern.

Have you taken a look at the Cloudflare Keyless SSL tech?

Re: Fastly S-1

#139

Post by arosier »

pbreit wrote: post #136
Rafuino wrote: post #135

I'm not experienced with S-1 filings, but don't they usually include the share price targeted and amount they're looking to raise? It's blank up top on the document right now. When is that typically filled in?

Not until closer to the IPO date after investors haven been able to make an evaluation and been pitched by company and bankers. A 7x multiple on $140m in sales might suggest around $1b (divide that by # shares to get a possible share price).

Or look at Zoom's 47.7x multiple and you've got a $6.6B market cap

Re: Fastly S-1

#140

Post by mevile »

Where I work, a website/app in the top 20 US alexa rankings, we use Fastly and it is pretty great. If I have a complaint it's that their varnish version is old. The web UI is great, the service is great. I've never had an issue with them in my many years of working with them.
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