It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores. It makes me feel like I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about internet application architectures.
We raised a bunch of money
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Re: We raised a bunch of money
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I honestly don't know what it is you're looking to hear. We said what we're using the money for: hardware, rolling out more regions, and a bunch more support and infra engineers.
you are telling us what fly will be spending the money on.
what OP is asking is, what did the investors receive in exchange for giving fly the money.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in multiple regions You’re describing the current state of the world We’re there already. The entire system is built to exploit everybody who does not have significant capital to fight back against it
I am so curious why you repeatedly spit in the collective face of the millions of small business owners in the US and around the world. If what you say were true, the world would exist as a series of 3-5 megacorps, and small businesses would not exist. Since they do exist, how do you square that with your claim that only the "extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size" is currently true?
I agree, most businesses are very small. Large businesses and especially very large businesses are the exception.
4.7M of the 8M US businesses have https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/small-business-week....
Starting a business requires little more than filing incorporation documents with your state.
Growing a business to dominate a market and get crazy rich may require outside funding, but growing a business to support and maintain your individual lifestyle does not.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#274Okay so they raised 100m which means they need to work towards a 1bn exit. And if they want to keep their momentum going their r&d cost will go through the roof. Because they have to build the whole stack and it all has to be rock solid (eventually). It’s an immense engineering effort. I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real expense…
That's backwards. Profitability at scale is about the _only_ way for a cloud provider to be profitable. There's a reason you don't see a bunch of small cloud providers, the economics only work at scale.
Platform companies can't scale by just getting more of the type of customers they already have. They scale by getting bigger and more demanding customers. Those customers will expect the things AWS and the other big cloud platforms already offer. And then R&D expenses explode. The bigger they get the higher R&D will be. In absolute numbers and relative to revenue.
Yes, it's true that if you become as big as AWS then economy of scale starts to work in your favor again. But that outcome is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. The realistic best case outcome is that they become a mid-sized cloud provider, like Digital Ocean. And Digital Ocean, in business for 11 years and having raised 500m (pre IPO) is still losing money. Linode, after 20 years of struggle, ultimately gave up and sold for $900m last year. Even the best case outcome looks pretty bleak.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#275Re: We raised a bunch of money
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive business without outside capital. That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? You don't spend what you don't need _right now_. But Fly.io makes a good point about reaching critical mass to discuss better prices from their vendors. I can totally understand that.
> That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that's the promise for cloud computing customers . Fly.io is a cloud computing provider , and those are all hugely capital intensive businesses.
Fly.io can be a cloud computing provider while being a cloud computing customer, just like Heroku and others.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#277Is there any interest in working with telcos to manage MECs? It seems like they've finally given up on building their own container orchestration, and are now looking at Google's GDCE & Amazon's Outpost. But those fundamentally aren't good models for MEC.
I could definitely see a really interesting future for Fly where you're building tech to actively follow users between towers to provide the lowest possible latency to apps.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly don't know what it is you're looking to hear. We said what we're using the money for: hardware, rolling out more regions, and a bunch more support and infra engineers.
you are telling us what fly will be spending the money on. what OP is asking is, what did the investors receive in exchange for giving fly the money.
Stock.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#279Will 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, a…
> They literally run physical servers all over the world ... 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 genuinely struggle to understand how Fly.io managed (manages) to have this much physical server presence to date, having raised only ~$16M prior to this round. Hire a dozen engineers and that money starts to go fast. The regions page [1] shows 34 cities largely across 4 continents, but technically across 6 if you count the 1 region each in Africa and Australia.
Maybe they have managed to get inside other existing cloud's data centers and it's not literally their own physical hardware, or behind-the-scenes they are leasing collocated servers, etc.
I would love some insight here if one of the founders in the thread sees this.
Re: We raised a bunch of money
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 po…
Cloudflare does this although to my knowledge it's not available without an Enterprise subscription which is the only thing they offer with this level of compliance anyway.
All lower plans maybe get PCI DSS and that's it.
It's a valid counter to my point - while they clearly can do it locking it behind an enterprise "talk to us" subscription is lame. That said they are generally customer, market, and product savvy and I suspect they know that any/most orgs that are able to pull off the broader process, etc for actual compliance with these requirements are in fundamentally different positions than some random startup with a bunch of consumer data.
We're also seeing more and more ambiguity with coaching platform startups, etc who don't have a covered entity in sight but that's a different topic for a different day.
I've spent most of my career in HIPAA-relevant startups. Generally, I think it's actually a disservice all around for Amazon to basically rubber stamp these architectures and solutions with a HIPAA BAA so that companies think they can call themselves "HIPAA compliant". That's not even what it's supposed to mean, let alone the virtually endless issues and process that need to happen throughout the org for "compliant" to actually mean anything. I haven't reviewed it but I'm certain the AWS BAA is so specific and exclusionary it's trivial to step outside of what it covers.
Yes these agreements are a piece of the puzzle but it's completely reckless to throw something together in AWS, present the BAA to a customer, and call yourselves "HIPAA compliant". Savvy customers, investors, etc will call you out but otherwise it's mostly just a matter of time before you discover your standalone AWS BAA is actually just one of the things on a 50 point (or whatever) checklist.