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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair.

I stand by my point though that the culture has significantly changed since 2012 - you of all people know that.

Just go back and look a decade ago at when people would post “hey we raise all this money” posts.

A full half of the comments would be like “nobody cares that you raise money are you actually doing something important?” or similar.

Tbh I think it was a healthier perspective, and we need to bring more “hacker” back.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#252
post #57

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.

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Why is it that any time VC financing comes up in any fashion we end up with some unrelated pseudo-meme walloftext nonsense bouncing back and forth between a treatise on the structural inefficiencies of capitalism and tech fundraising from 30 years ago? All with some tenuous barely coherent tie back to blockchain, or NFTs, or web3, or whatever The Next Bitcoin™ du jour is.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#253
post #223

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should... > If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly Apps, there are many great options, including: Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's direct competitors.

Even if I granted your premise that these are direct competitors (they most certainly aren't)... why not?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Any idea if there are price caps? That's one thing i like about "dumb simple" machines is i'm paying for the machine, if it gets traffic and dies i still only pay $5/m. I'm not trying to build facebook, it's okay if it dies.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#255
post #187
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am skeptical that Hetzner or OVH or similar could get off the ground starting in 2023. There are a couple of things working against a boostrapped public cloud: First, you gotta buy expensive kit. And then hope you can make your money back over the next 18 months. Funding this is hard. You could try to borrow money, but that (a) increases your underlying cost and (b) dictates how you sell. You can't borrow money aga…

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#256
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You get that there's a whole section of this post headlined "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money", right?

yes and I reread it a few times in case I was missing something. I even turned my adblocker off in case it was removing the section that answers OP's questions but it didn't appear.

It's obviously perfectly fine if you don't want to or can't answer those questions and nobody is owed answers to them.

Just, you're known for a straight talking style so the omission is conspicuous.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#257

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…

Cloudflare is going for market share in the cloud.

Pretty safe bet that they'll stay cheap for a long time because of that.

Because outside of tech innovation, cost is still a mayor selling point.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#258
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.

You are completely missing the point of venture capital here.

Of course, bootstrapping exists, but I can't point to any similar companies to Fly which have achieved standout success in an area like this with a model like that.

> Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION.

Valuation is merely a side effect in pursuit of market dominance or hopefully establishing a niche monopoly.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8 vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the same.

It's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of €30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess an easy deploy story ?

You pay for not having to manage anything yourself or hire somebody dedicated to do so. How much is that worth?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#260

"Why do startups write announcements like these?" I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read…

> I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read tech press.

It's less about "excuse for press" and more "controlling the narrative". Raising this amount will mean that other news outlets will pick up on it. Technically, as I recall, it's public information (I founded a company and this was all explained to me - but it was years ago).

So if you don't publish they will. You're much better off publishing first so that people read your post, not theirs.

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