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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#71

Post by higerordermap »

staticassertion wrote: post #68
4778468d wrote: post #59

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

That's not surprising - lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. It was pretty easy to just click "Documentation" and see more: https://vercel.com/docs > Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervisio…

> lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front.

This one is better than most zero information PR lines. For what it is worth the statement can't be written by GPT-3.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#72

Post by paulintrognon »

sdan wrote: post #46
adim86 wrote: post #9

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

Vercel basically makes frontend dev super easy. You can literally type in "vc" in your terminal (after installing their cli) and it'll build and deploy everything you have locally in seconds (think React or Nextjs, a React framework). You can also use their serverless functions; which add "backend" functionality to your existing frontends. You can deploy these serverless functions in a bunch of languages (see docs) b…

Where would those DBs be deployed? I mean, can vercel host DBs or do you still have to figure out a way of host them yourself?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#73

Post by caust1c »

tomp wrote: post #64
swyx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. not a very intellectually honest statement to make considering founder supervoting shares are extremely common in tech.

How long will that persist? Any such company has no chance of being included in e.g. S&P 500 so there's clearly strong pressure in the opposite direction...

Who cares about being in the S&P 500? It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#74

Post by chrisweekly »

Jestar342 wrote: post #20
adim86 wrote: post #9

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

Serverless web apps. Using their own Next.js as an example: everything in /pages/ is client app, everything in /api/ is serverless app. Client talks to the /api/ endpoints, /api/ endpoints talk to your domain services. Vercel also provide edge-location hosting and caching.

To be more precise: Vercel is the company (fka "Zeit").

They have a suite of complementary software products and services, including NextJS (a "batteries included" React framework with robust support for SSR and SSG), Now (hosting / CDN / runtime in "serverless" paradigm), Micro, etc.

World-class DX and remarkably powerful tools that somehow combine simplicity and flexibility.

No affiliation, just a longtime grateful fan.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#76

Post by chrisweekly »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #28
adim86 wrote: post #9

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

I had the same question. I’m an experienced developer and I could not figure out the substance of what this product offers from a glance at its front page. It vaguely seemed like a replacement for react but it’s hard to believe you could raise $40M for that so something else must be going on. I generally was under the impression that the industry was moving away from client side rendering since it’s so slow. At least…

One of the major selling points of NextJS is precisely to address the issues with CSR (client-side rendering). It offers SSG (static site generation) for build-time rendering -- no client JS required. But also SSR (server-side rendering, ie at runtime), and automatic hydration for CSR too.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#77

Post by sdan »

paulintrognon wrote: post #72
sdan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel basically makes frontend dev super easy. You can literally type in "vc" in your terminal (after installing their cli) and it'll build and deploy everything you have locally in seconds (think React or Nextjs, a React framework). You can also use their serverless functions; which add "backend" functionality to your existing frontends. You can deploy these serverless functions in a bunch of languages (see docs) b…

Where would those DBs be deployed? I mean, can vercel host DBs or do you still have to figure out a way of host them yourself?

Yeah, you'd have to host them yourself. So suppose you have a basic webapp with users logged in a DB:

Vercel(Frontend -> Serverless functions) -> DB

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#78

Post by neurostimulant »

paulintrognon wrote: post #72
sdan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel basically makes frontend dev super easy. You can literally type in "vc" in your terminal (after installing their cli) and it'll build and deploy everything you have locally in seconds (think React or Nextjs, a React framework). You can also use their serverless functions; which add "backend" functionality to your existing frontends. You can deploy these serverless functions in a bunch of languages (see docs) b…

Where would those DBs be deployed? I mean, can vercel host DBs or do you still have to figure out a way of host them yourself?

You're supposed to use other hosted database vendor or your own database server if you need it. I don't think they offer any database service.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#79

Post by chrisweekly »

naavis wrote: post #13
talolard wrote: post #2

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

Could you describe what kind of pain points have you had? I've been building a photo-intensive static personal website lately. I started off with Next.js, but later switched to Gatsby, because so many things just worked out-of-the-box with it. This was especially the case with optimizing and resizing images. For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is…

NextJS supports export for 100% static site generation (like Gatsby). Unlike Gatsby, it _also_ supports a server runtime and SSR, and everything in between. Its magic is the good kind that decomposes into sane primitives. Respectfully, it sounds like you might have needed to spend a little more time with the docs.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#80

Post by tln »

chrshawkes wrote: post #34

No offense, I think people are crazy to rely on a stack they can easily make themselves vs. a series B startup. It's not that difficult to build and deploy full stack apps on your own server.

If it's not hard to deploy on your server, then it's also easy to switch when you have to.

In the meantime you get faster, free hosting, better builds and spend zero time on ops.

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