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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#311

Post by bombcar »

dadrian wrote: post #172
Solvency wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simpl…

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…

Just buy an ASIN and use a VPS provider than understands them. You are now multihomed.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#312

Post by agotterer »

willsmith72 wrote: post #227
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #205

Earlier 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

It's just not though. Surely you know (or know of) people who've built successful businesses with the help of funding, and couldn't have done so without it. Just because someone takes funding, doesn't make them any less or a part of some "built" system. Even my favourite bakery could never have got started without funding - with debt not equity. It doesn't make him any less brilliant. He would've had to be extremely…

Not all funding is creating equal or share the same expectations. Borrowing money from a bank to open a bakery or taking an investment from friends and family to cover the initial startup costs is very different from raising venture capital money. The growth and return on investment expectations are wildly different.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#313

Post by hugs »

fishtoaster wrote: post #31

"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…

Yup. When I was deep in the VC-fueled startup game, tech press did not want to write about us at all, unless there was also some kind of funding news included, too.. (I interpreted this as the writers knowing their readers... and only stories with funding announcements got the clicks...) So guess what happened? We would raise money, then not talk about it for up to 6 months until we also had some new feature or product to launch.

If people started clicking more on tech stories that didn't have funding announcements, maybe the cycle would change... But it feels like we're in some kind of Prisoner's Dilemma game now. Those stories don't written, so they don't get the clicks, so they don't get written...

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#314

Post by cryptonector »

fishtoaster wrote: post #31

"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…

Free press == free advertising.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#315

Post by grog454 »

kkielhofner wrote: post #217
kortilla wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.

Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Work…

> Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care

Glad that works for you but for my game servers edge computing is not ideal and generally currently not even applicable.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#316

Post by jeremyjh »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #131
dswalter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).

EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board! Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.

Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#317

Post by unshavedyak »

doublepg23 wrote: post #286
unshavedyak wrote: post #118

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 ran fly for a six months and it went from free to $10/mo and I still don’t know why. I’d say if static pricing is important to you stick with DO.

Some variation is okay, but boy do i need pricing caps. I might give it a try just for security (not managing the OS), but if there's no caps.. oof.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#318

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#319

Post by donmcronald »

duxup wrote: post #228

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more m…

> It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be.

This is where I always get burned. As they get larger and larger, and the product gets more complex, they see it as value that I'm not paying for, but I see it as negative value because I'm forced to deal with all the added complexity that I don't even want. Then, one day, they decide I shouldn't be "freeloading" on their super awesome platform and change pricing to something that isn't even close to reasonable for me.

It's like hiring someone to cut your grass and a few years later you go outside to find 3 guys on riding lawnmowers telling you that prices are going up because obviously you're not paying enough to cover the costs of the service you're getting. It's not my fault they scaled their business to accommodate customers with 10 acre lawns and assumed I needed the same level of service, but I'm the one left without lawn care.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#320

Post by AndrewKemendo »

nologic01 wrote: post #295
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…

other things being equal, organic growth via paying customers is the time-honored way of avoiding the pathologies you mention. in this model speculative capital is only required in the very early stages. a company either reaches a symbiotic relation with its clients or not. the burden is primarily on intrinsic aspects of what the startup venture delivers and how much this resonates in its sector. the VC model is basi…

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