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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#231

Post by ben-schaaf »

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…

> As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let government spend in things like education, infrastructure, social security.

As companies grow so does their ability to dodge taxes. That's why they're headquartered in Ireland, Bermuda or whatever the latest low corporate tax state is. Proportionally they're likely paying less than a corner store. I certainly pay more in income tax.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#232

Post by tptacek »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #216
tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact opposite: we're a fullstack platform, so our target audience is largely people who don't just host static Javascript.

Maybe I'm mis-understanding the "Deploy App Servers Close to Your Users" thing. I don't get how moving your app servers far from your database makes things faster. Typically the app is more chatty with the db than with the client. So it is better for your app and db servers to be close together, even if they are far from some segment of users. If fly made distributed databases "heroku easy" that would be impressive,…

We have a "built-in" (for lack of a better term --- it's just another Fly app) multi-region single-write-leader clustered Postgres offering, but people also run their own databases directly here; the core feature is regionalized durable NVMe storage.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#233

Post by dccoolgai »

I don't understand all these comments coming out of the woodwork like "oh, no - one day they may raise prices and try to be the bad guys". I don't plan on using fly personally, but I don't understand how you could look at another provider entering the market and parse that as a "bad thing".

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#234

Post by tonymillion »

ZiiS wrote: post #180
munificent wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 implicat…

You can build a small ship and a track record of profitable trade with the next port, then the next country over before undertaking an ocean crossing.

And by the time you've done that 97.3% of all shipping from the new world is being handled by a small handful of companies with gigantic cargo ships.

But congratulations, you've successfully created a small "local" business with a decent number of customers who are reasonably loyal. You should be happy with what you have and possibly invest in future generations who want to colonize the moon or something (assuming you want to expand your wealth)

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#235

Post by coder9874 »

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…

Good luck avoiding every single venture-funded company. Can you give an example of such a "monopoly"? Vercel? They have plenty of competitors, all they are doing is charging a premium for convenience. There will always be alternatives to any given tool if you don't like the costs. Seems your problem is with capitalism and not this particular startup.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#236

Post by makestuff »

asim wrote: post #149
kkielhofner wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regions do matter for stuff like GDPR though. It is beneficial to know that all of the data is in the EU region and will stay there.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#237

Post by SamuelAdams »

asim wrote: post #149
kkielhofner wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a counterpoint, anyone working with compliance data needs to know and be certain that data does not cross geo-boundaries. Intelligence data for US gov’t agencies must typically be kept stateside: AWS uses the GovCloud region specifically for satisfying gov compliance requirements.

Passing HIPAA data through other countries when not needed to is generally frowned upon - data should be kept as local as reasonably possible. I haven’t worked with GDPR requirements but I have heard they are similar. AWS solved this problem well with regions. I’m curious what other providers that are “regionless” do to solve the compliance problem.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#238

Post by scarface_74 »

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.…

Real world example: was DropBox a better or worse product when they were a simple syncing app before they started “innovating”.

The only consumer company that I can think of that went from “initial value proposition” to “not sucking after it went public” is BackBlaze. None of their new offerings has taken away from their initial “unlimited cheap backup” offering.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#239

Post by OriginalMrPink »

comice wrote: post #203
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as a customer.

as the OP says: > but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

"Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money" doesn't answer any of the questions above. I've seen private equity rounds disguised as traditional founding rounds, which is neither very transparent, nor very honest. Raising 70M just shortly after a 25M round makes me feel like there was more at play then just 'raising' money tbh. But I might be totally off here - but therefore disclosing a bit more than you currently do might be really helpful.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#240

Post by AndrewKemendo »

coder9874 wrote: post #235
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…

Good luck avoiding every single venture-funded company. Can you give an example of such a "monopoly"? Vercel? They have plenty of competitors, all they are doing is charging a premium for convenience. There will always be alternatives to any given tool if you don't like the costs. Seems your problem is with capitalism and not this particular startup.

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