Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 484 posts

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#161

Post by mrkurt »

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 ;)

Roughly this, yes. It's easy to run boring apps close to your users. Thus, people buy computer time from us instead of a place that runs in one city.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#162

Post by berkle4455 »

lazyant wrote: post #114
berkle4455 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ .

Not even 14 jobs, there's only one (or two) open positions listed there.

Oh, damn, I didn't even notice that the job is listed alongside a "no positions"

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#163

Post by Aeolun »

mrkurt wrote: post #49
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…

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.

> I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money

Only if your condition is that you want to do it in the next 3 years.

Given 15, I imagine quite a lot is possible.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#164

Post by EGreg »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #154
EGreg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think you could just say: "Instead of relying on the concentrated capital of VC firms, we should rely more on individuals investing smaller amounts in companies they want to use. The individuals collective stake in the company can help protect them from the company going against their interests." That's just the main point right? Everything becomes essentially Kickstarter/Patreon subscriptions, and maybe you pay a…

Well yes, and now you can do it using open protocols, without relying on centralized platforms for the money part.

Utility tokens need a decentralized network so there is no single point of failure. Just like the Web itself (1.0) disrupted gatekeepers at newspapers, TV and Radio stations, etc. that you used to have to pay (“payola”) to get the word out. VOIP lowered the cost of long distance phonecalls to pretty much zero by eliminating middlemen, too. The infrastructure providers shouldn’t ALSO control your app layer, that’s the point!

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#165

Post by jwr »

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. In the long term, in a venture funded business, there is no outcome that is good for users.

"Growth" is the focus now, until the business dies (by acquisition, IPO or bankrupcy, all of which are bad for users).

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#166

Post by cloogshicer »

autonomousErwin wrote: post #117
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 think It's actually quite a beneficial pattern for the likes of the consumer and the founders. Say Fly will eventually get acquired or IPO, their founders will justify it that they could use that money to work on Fly's mission statement or if they've had their fill of servers go on to build further startups in Fusion, AI, or Space Technologies or even give to charity (take your pick). When they do get acquired/IPO…

Except when you get something like YouTube or the American telcos that have a monopoly/oligopoly and suck all potential for competition out of the space.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#167

Post by mrkurt »

tylergetsay wrote: post #109
tptacek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people, and the platform strategy is to build durable storage primitives that work for as many different databases as possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.

Do you have any info about how edge deployments + sqlite work and what kind of applications they are limited to?

Basically, LiteFS: https://github.com/superfly/litefs

And then some load balancer cleverness that reroutes writes to a specific VM: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#168

Post by tennis_80 »

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…

I’m not the person you’re replying to but I’d say so.

Under $5/month you pay nothing at the moment.

https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/

You need to look at the following for pricing:

- Compute

- Volumes (attached SSD, one per compute instance) - $0.15/GB/month.

- Bandwidth - if you go over 160GB you have to pay per GB.

Gut feel, ~$5/month should be fine for a small project as long as you’re not storing loads of data or doing something that requires lots of bandwidth.

If your project is used irregularly and HTTP based, you can also scale compute down to 0 machines. It’ll boot up again when you get a HTTP request. In my experience it took ~3s or so to boot up a NestJS app on a small VM, totally acceptable for a dev environment.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#169

Post by ajsharp »

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…

Complaining about companies raising venture capital on hacker news! What!? No way!?

This is going to sound wild, but believe it or not it takes quite a bit of capital to reserve capacity in data centers ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your core value prop of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This used to just be called making a capital investment (because it takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to whine about venture capital.

You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7 coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit takes...capital.

Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not from venture capital firms?

Honestly, do you even know what you're bitching about? A theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b. would not exist if fly did not theoretically create a product so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is not a monopoly, it's market dominance; they are very different)?

And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably should raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and orders of magnitude easier.

Take your aimless cope elsewhere.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#170

Post by jacobsenscott »

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…

How hard is it to hire people who understand how a physical server even works these days? Probably most engineers under 40 have never touch a physical machine, under 30 maybe have never seen an ethernet cable...
Post reply on HN