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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#91

Post by renewiltord »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will 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…

I don't understand why someone comes to a startup incubator and VC forum when they hate venture funded startups. You know what YC does, right?

There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise? Why? It's just baffling behavior.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#92

Post by Solvency »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will 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…

This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simply how business is done. Every single person looking to build a company for the purposes of becoming rich should adhere religiously to this playbook. It's a cold, hard, transactional fact of life. Whether or not the product is good and fair and honest is largely an independent variable to this basic playbook process.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#93

Post by bfung »

kkielhofner wrote: post #56
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

People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridi…

Stateless compute is relatively simple to be region-less, but even fly’s homepage has a map of regions.

When state is introduced, then CAP/PACELC distributed systems issues arise, and figuring out approaches to deal with them are a must. Read fly’s Postgres docs, and regions come right back in.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#94

Post by awkward »

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, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he could have still made a joke without making it up.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#95

Post by jeremy_k »

sneak wrote: post #17
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

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.

I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#96

Post by xNeil »

tptacek wrote: post #76
hgsgm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does PR know you are posting this? Number of restaurants is a measurement of hosting quality? Uptime doesn't matter?

This is neither here nor there, but every time I read a comment like this, all I can think about is that scene in The Office where Dwight Schrute is screaming into his cell phone "Are you saying you invented paper?!"

Yeah this is pretty funny - if you speak to PR before posting something, it's 'PR-riddled bull** written by some executive', or 'corporate talk'. If you don't speak to PR before posting something, it's 'Did you speak to PR before posting this?' There's no winning.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#97

Post by craigkerstiens »

mrkurt wrote: post #68
davepeck wrote: post #54

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?) Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?

Most of Heroku's revenue is from Postgres. They're arguably a managed Postgres provider with some app hosting tooling (this is not fair, but an interesting way to think about Heroku). We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of apps. So Heroku felt very constrained. We see our…

I'd dispute that MOST of the revenue is from Postgres, though it is likely a very large double digit percentage of revenue.

Their managed Postgres got an unfair advantage early on by being the default. With a new rails app you were just given a Heroku Postgres database. Heroku's Postgres offering was over 5 years ahead of RDS Postgres and a large part of the reason Amazon added support for Postgres for years they fought it, but eventually had to give into the constant customer request. Unfortunately that innovation of Postgres has stalled out a bit over time due to Salesforce starvation.

I do admit for what people think of as PaaS the Postgres revenue is significant, the part people would probably be surprised about is how much revenue the add-ons marketplace constitutes.

Interestingly New Relic got the same privileged experience in the early days and it resulted in the same type of revenue and mass adoption for New Relic.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#98

Post by xNeil »

sneak wrote: post #17
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

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.

Genuine question - what does being a hacker have to do with being an author?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#99

Post by Zetice »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will 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…

Honest question: why are you on a site whose community is literally created and run by a startup accelerator?

It's a given you realize how antagonistic you're being here, so I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?

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