We raised a bunch of money • Hacker News Board

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#31

Post by fishtoaster » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:52 PM UTC

"Why do startups write announcements like these?"

I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read tech press.

There's nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I'm just surprised they acknowledged mercenary reasons without mentioning what I've seen as the most common one.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#32

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:53 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #29

geraldwhen wrote: post #2

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is.

(The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#33

Post by reeaper » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

Scarbutt wrote: post #30

Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.

I did have my postgresql DB on their service randomly stop once and didn't restart until I logged in and poked it :(

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#34

Post by buf » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

Scarbutt wrote: post #30

Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.

I also don't use fly (yet) because of technical issues they have. They are in a really messy state at the moment.

Nevertheless, I'm excited for them and continue to cheer them on until they mature.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#35

Post by nickpeterson » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #29

geraldwhen wrote: post #2

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

Well if you’re right maybe in a couple years we’ll see a ‘We razed a bunch of money’ post, seems on brand.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#36

Post by mattmaroon » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

One of the best-written press releases I’ve seen for sure.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#37

Post by catchnear4321 » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

> Our first reason is obvious, and mercenary.

even though there’s a reason (or three) behind the style of the post, including the use of transparency, it is refreshing.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#38

Post by cvwright » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

> There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the margins work.

Amen to that.

Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it.

But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#39

Post by candiddevmike » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #32

candiddevmike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about peopl…

You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#40

Post by gizmo » Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

Okay so they raised 100m which means they need to work towards a 1bn exit. And if they want to keep their momentum going their r&d cost will go through the roof. Because they have to build the whole stack and it all has to be rock solid (eventually). It’s an immense engineering effort.

I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real expense is r&d, marketing and SBC and those will rule out profitability at any scale. These are not one-time expenses. You have to keep spending forever or your customers will leave. We’ve seen this time and time again. Heroku isn’t the only example. It’s the tragedy of platform/infra startups.