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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#141

Post by xeromal »

xNeil wrote: post #98
sneak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A lot of the famous SF folk are known for being a bit opinionated and snarky in their writing.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#142

Post by yolo3000 »

phaer wrote: post #24
yolo3000 wrote: post #8

So if the bookstore doesn't think it's worth it to spend more than 2 hours on deploying to the edge, maybe it's not that important to them, or :) ?

I think fly.io believes that they can allow the bookstore to do so in less than two hours for a price where it's still important enough for the bookstore and profitable - in aggregate - for fly.io. I personally believe that could be true, but their investors going to find out ;)

So change your infra to save a few hours :D I guess they have other compelling features.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#143

Post by mrkurt »

unshavedyak wrote: post #118
h_mirin wrote: post #18

I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku. I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.

I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system. Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a co…

A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some months are better than others).

Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each.

Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#144

Post by colechristensen »

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…

>selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?

I mean... raising prices ≠ "selling out any pretense..."

You're upset that a growing business lowers prices to grow faster? Ok, but maybe relax a little. You're upset that advertising-based businesses eventually shut down the ad-free clients that use the API? Ok, but maybe relax a little.

A business grows with low prices and loses some customers not willing to pay when they put up prices that reflect longer term sustainability. That happens, why does it have to be a moral outrage?

Yeah, if you're using a VC-backed startup expect the cheap services to get pulled back on when they hit IPO time.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#145

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

Zetice wrote: post #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…

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?

Where better to talk about the downsides of VC funding?

I don’t think anyone wants HN to become an echo chamber that believes VC funding is the solution to all problems.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#146

Post by munificent »

Solvency wrote: post #122
esteth wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you want to do. If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.

There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D. It's trivial to imagine how a responsible incremental funding approach could create a better, more transparent, more estimable, more reportable, more mappable, more rigorously trackable innovation process. Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION.…

> There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D.

This works for some but not all business ventures.

There's a reason corporations were invented in the Age of Sail. If you build 5% of a ship, you can't sail to the New World and bring back 5% of the resources. You just sink in the harbor.

(The moral implications of relating modern VC-invested corporations to rapacious European conquests of the already-inhabited-thank-you-very-much New World is not lost on me.)

I believe there are healthy ways to start up a business that has startup costs too large to bootstrap. I agree with you that VCs are often not it.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#147

Post by alex_lav »

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…

To be fair (this comment is mostly a joke), Ashburn/Loudoun County is pretty nice for a suburb/strip mall hell. I've had some really good food in that area.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#148

Post by munificent »

Zetice wrote: post #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…

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?

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

Why do missionaries go where no one believes their religion already? The idea that you must already be a believer in some community to participate in the community makes little sense and certainly isn't a good way to make progress.

> I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?

Would you also characterize your own reply as mere attention seeking?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#149

Post by asim »

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…

THIS. No one cares about regions, you just care that the app is fast and globally available. The way we did things is a relic of the past and everyone mimics it because trying to guide new user behaviour is hard. The reality is we just need the app to be globally deployed with a globally distributed database and anycast DNS to route you to the local most DC. There's a lot more to it, have built this architecture more than a couple times, but it all needs to be in the service of something and if you're UX isn't better than the next guy, it won't matter much.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#150

Post by cnity »

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…

The question of whether "the edge" takes off will come down to whether or not the culture at large will swallow the illusion at its heart. You cannot remove the concept of a region any more than you can remove the concept of "the computer" in a cloud environment.
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