301–310 of 484 posts
[1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] - https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...
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You raise money to pay for costs of running the business. 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. Good luck getting even four regions for less than $1M. The world would be far worse off if all tech businesses had to be bootstrapped. That being said, there's c…
> 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
Our biggest advantage is working together as a community, and our biggest flaw is not helping each other when we easily could.
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Is fly vs Hetzner really apples to apples though? A more apt comparison would be to AWS, GCP, and Azure no?
How isn’t? You’re paying for a VM with access to a slice of resources. Yes fly.io offers some clever deployment and routing, but it’s still your code running on a VM.
Whatever the answer is, it’s probably the same answer for why many companies would likely be willing to pay more for fly.io than Hetzner as well.
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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.
Blockchain is the most widespread and proven way thus far to eliminate the middleman, and it’s there right now, you can deploy a token in a few minutes if you wanted. Many people here seem to keep repeating the mantra that “Web3 has no good applications” but here is one that literally solves the societal problem you are complaining about and has done so with IPFS, Ethereum, Polygon and many other permissionless networks.
It’s a wall of text because there are literally so many detailed examples, that I chose to engage in a few. I like to back up what I’m saying so people don’t think I’m just talking out of my ass. Now the ball is in your court to explain why you disagree anyway.
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> 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?
Their income is similar to that of most working professionals and their assets are similar to the savings of most working professionals. They entrepreneured themselves into having a job, they're not the investor/capitalist multimillionaires we picture when we think of rich people.
>the world would exist as a series of 3-5 megacorps, and small businesses would not exist
The economy exists as the 500 megacorps that make up the s&p 500. Small businesses just fill in the gaps and are for the most part beholden to the megacorps for their business, their supplies and/or their financing.
> The kind of platform company we want to be hasn’t changed since 2020. Our features are all generally a command or two in flyctl, and they work for any app that can packaged in a container.
can be packaged
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…
Nothing is forever. Five years is a long time. People need motivation. Enjoy and make use of things while they last. Nobody owes you anything.
But you have options.
You can have a business genius build a company that delivers great product forever without grinding employees into the dust, burning up founders and still outmaneuvering competitors.
You can have no product or a company going under because founders have stretched them thin, burned out and went broke ruining their lives pursuing a good idea that morphed into a sunken cost.
Or you can crazy pricing models justified by the desire to live like a VC LP while shipping a 3rd party API-dependent cute app. But without VC!
Or you can have a VC-subsidized business that ships a product at ridiculously low prices, locks you in for some 3-5 years and then goes ballistic and becomes unusable. But it’s been five years of a very good run, FIVE YEARS. And then the next will come to take their place.
Reading how five years is a short timeline for a low-cost-high-value product is wild. Now that’s some entitlement.
Can someone remind me, what is "edge"? It it hosting server-side applications in a position in the network topology that minimizes latency to end users? Or is it that, but for static resources (so similar to the concept of CDN)?
It's the term of art for the portions of the Internet closest to specific customers, and, more generally, for the notion of deploying things in multiple locations, simultaneously such that they're close to users in different cities.
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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 mon…
i was in this business until a couple of years ago.
we'd quote prices for potential customers currently in public cloud and they literally wouldn't believe us. it actually became an impediment in the sales cycle and part of the reason we sold. people are dumb, but i'd be even dumber if i expected them to change for my benefit.
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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…