The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing burger.
A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty noteworthy to me.
That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/.
We raised a bunch of money
41–50 of 484 posts
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?
In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have significant representation in local politics. In this specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to public service.
This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#43“ 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
How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.
It's great, and it shows in their docs also.
Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#44"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…
Saying it's "for press" just kicks the can down the road, raising the question "why do startups want press on announcements like these?" They do it to get out a certain message and leave a certain impression, usually of the mercenary sort the post outlines.
Although I see your point about it just being to get the name of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary motivation that the post maybe did not mention.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#45Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO?
Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off.
Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#46“ 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.
Honestly though, Fly.io feels like it's off into the future in terms of hosting platforms. Undoubtedly they'll have to work on the reliability problems, not denying that - however, for anyone that can tolerate a bit of reliability issues, which to be honest, is more people than will readily admit it, it might just be worth the trouble for developer experience that legitimately feels like it's from the future.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#48> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript.
Throwing shade at cloudflare edge workers?
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#49Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…
The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power.
I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#50Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…
Exactly what went through my head when reading
> There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures
There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.