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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#141

Post by [deleted] »

polote wrote: post #115
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…

They want enterprise customers, not single developers. So they use the usual bullshit marketing wordings. Their only goal is to get someone high level in a big company feeling the sentence is cool so that he lets his email in the "get demo" page. This is just normal enterprise sales, and this is probably why they managed to raise so much compared to most similar services. They really have a strong business focus and…

[deleted]

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#142

Post by ebiester »

polote wrote: post #115
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…

They want enterprise customers, not single developers. So they use the usual bullshit marketing wordings. Their only goal is to get someone high level in a big company feeling the sentence is cool so that he lets his email in the "get demo" page. This is just normal enterprise sales, and this is probably why they managed to raise so much compared to most similar services. They really have a strong business focus and…

That’s a jaded view. The truth is that most enterprise customers are not making a decision based on a front page blurb and are going to Vercel because they have a problem they already need solved.

The problem here is “I want to avoid increasing the number of backend and SRE engineers for the customer-facing portions of the business and I have a team bought into next.js already or are platform-agnostic.”

People are not Stumbling upon vercel. The developers are coming through next.js. That said, I think this is evidence they could have better copy on the front page.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#143

Post by city17 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #129
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…

Front end deployment, when done correctly, is already easy. S3 + Cloudfront and done: all your static assets are globally available everywhere with good response times in all major geographic areas.

I switched from S3 + Cloudfront to Vercel, simply because it's even easier.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#144

Post by robertoandred »

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…

So you read two sentences, but not the rest of the page? They explain everything pretty clearly.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#145

Post by friedman23 »

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…

Every single thread on HN is filled with the same cynicism. It's getting boring and I consider myself to be a cynic.

What are you even complaining about in this comment? You are complaining that you can't learn what a company does in a single sentence? Or are you claiming that vercel is a bullshit company (because it isn't)

Also, if you scroll down just a little bit in that page you learn exactly what vercel does.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#146

Post by kd0amg »

NationalPark wrote: post #138
rbinv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "serverless", to me, makes as much sense as "No Software" (Salesforce) did back then: none. I do get the point of "you're not managing any actual servers", but still.

You know what he's talking about though, seems like the word did its job fine.

Having had it explained to me later, yes, but when I first heard the term I thought it was a rebranding of standalone desktop applications rather than something that involves servers.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#147

Post by justicezyx »

ignoramous wrote: post #57

u/rauchg grew zeit.co ( Now ) [0][1] -> next.js [2] -> Vercel [3] iteratively over 3 years to raise Series A and B within 8 months of each other. Along the way, showing how OSS businesses can win: Slowly but steadily (looking at you mesosphere). Congrats to everyone at Vercel! God knows it has taken very many pivots to finally reach here. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12320489 [1] https://news.ycombinator.…

About Mesosphere:

Mesosphere was started by Berkeley PhD interned at Google Borg. They worked on some exploratory project to expand the capabilities of Borg platform and wrote some paper.

Unfortunately, that project was on a slightly skewed direction of the technical trend. The philosophy and direction embodied in that project was neither useful inside Google, nor it matches the industry trend. But nonetheless an interesting improvement.

With the reputation of the group and relationship they decided to start a company.

And once docker is out, and kubernetrd next, in 2014 many have seen that mesos the technology is bound to irrelevance.

That prediction verified itself rather quickly, when mesosphere rebranded itself d2iq.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#148

Post by Grustaf »

paxys wrote: post #136
Grustaf wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is for end-users, this is for developers. At least I guess it is, haven't been able to figure out exactly what they offer.

Developers are end users as well

Well, how about “dropbox is aimed at the general population of computer users, and not just computer savvy developers”?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#149

Post by blackearl »

ink404 wrote: post #92
skeeter2020 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's reasonable for someone arriving at the website with the very common question of "what exactly do they do?" to click the "Documentation" link?

For a developer audience, yes. For a non technical audience, no.

OP posted the non-tech audience answer and is hot under the collar about it. Do you need them to spell out every part of what they do? Part of investing is due diligence

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#150

Post by duhi88 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #42
tootie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatsby is a weird platform. It's gotten absolutely humongous for a product that is designed to only solve the simplest problems. Netlify has taken it to it's limit by adding redirects and lambdas. But it's still a platform for fancy brochures and blogs.

I agree with this weird mismatch of overcomplexity for the problem it's trying to solve. I did really like though the Gatsby model of ingesting all your source data into GraphQL and then having a standardised way to query and build pages from this. I wish Next.js would learn something from this. I was using Next.js to build a staticly-generated website (so within the remit of Gatsby) but eventually i outgrew the limi…

That feels like the React community in a nutshell.
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