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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#131

Post by LeifCarrotson »

dswalter wrote: post #11
yieldcrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?

The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).

EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board!

Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#132

Post by jacobsenscott »

cvwright wrote: post #38

> 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?"

I don't think there's enough expertise in running hardware out there, frankly. For a company where running hardware isn't their bread and butter finding and hiring people who can do it, and do it well, is existentially risky. It is hard enough to find people who can properly run on a PaaS.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#133

Post by arandr0x »

yieldcrv wrote: post #10
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

> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?

In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#134

Post by robertlagrant »

EGreg wrote: post #57
madeofpalk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

It just all seems irrelevant to fly.io. I can host stuff on there for money, which is all I want from a service provider. Electricity and storage and network and compute and infrastructure engineers cost money, and I'm happy to give them money. How does web3 get these things paid for?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#135

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #127
mrkurt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers…

I was hoping Kurt was going to do an extended spiel on hardware margins and bandwidth pricing. You should keep needling him for this, because it's super interesting.

I want my ip address blog post!

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#136

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

While I tend to agree with your overall thesis, and I get particularly baffled when some SaaS company, whose nearly sole expense is payroll, feels the need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, fly.io is a cloud infrastructure company.

They literally run physical servers all over the world (at least, that's my understanding from their website). I've got to imagine then that this business has huge capital costs, and it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive business without outside capital.

I don't disagree with your main point. Everyone has seen "enshittification" eventually take over all tech startups as they switch the focus from satisfying users to satisfying investors. But I just don't see how you build a business that requires running servers all over the world without a lot of capital.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#137

Post by Electricniko »

renewiltord wrote: post #91
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.

Not OP, but I think the answer is that a lot of people who quit Reddit a couple weeks ago have spread out to other news/discussion forums to find something to replace it. They're still in the exploration phase trying to find communities that resemble subreddits they used. The content on this forum sort of resembles a few tech related subreddits, even if the discussions and intent are quite different.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#138

Post by Dwolb »

mrkurt wrote: post #102
styren wrote: post #83

I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 pe…

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers…

If your customers are really SMBs it’d make sense to partner with low-code/no-code platforms.

Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small brain).

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#139

Post by [deleted] »

gotmedium wrote: post #88
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…

If that is the case, then you shouldn't be using Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Git, etc etc. Companies raise money now to generate cash flows in the future from a wildly risky innovation. Assuming the thesis is correct, the company will then to pay it back to investors (VCs and their investors including Endowment Funds), but also employee and taxes. As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and t…

[deleted]

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#140

Post by tjoff »

rco8786 wrote: post #113
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…

> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. What about posting on a forum owned and operated by a venture firm? Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed tech firms is endless. I don't even disagree with the general sentiment...but your resolution seems particularly short-sighted.

> Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed tech firms is endless.

Not a convincing list of companies there...

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