321–330 of 484 posts
> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript. Playful jab on Cloudflare and Deno. Would be interesting if Fly took up hosting "WASM containers" in addition to Docker containers.
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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.
"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…
Any time I read an announcement like this I refresh my knowledge of competitors and make a mental note that it might be time to switch soon.
> 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.
If you're an investor that's a valid concern. But as a user? I've been happy to have VC funding subsidize my food via Hello Fresh etc. whenever I'm inclined.
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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…
“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts
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…
I'm currently at a startup that started on Aptible a few years ago because there was a lack of expertise in systems development. We're now in the process of migrating to AWS natively because of cost savings (it's why I was hired). Aptible is costing us 3-4x what native AWS will. Yes, we're incurring some operational overhead, but the automation and tooling for managing infra is reasonably mature (Terragrunt & Terraform aren't perfect, but they work well enough).
Ultimately, startups may start with higher-level cloud providers, but they'll eventually migrate to lower-level providers eventually. At the higher end of the growth curve, companies likely wind up getting back to on-prem in some way.
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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.
Because open source software is the only alternative we know to the problem that was described, that has consistently liberated people everywhere it was introduced. And utility tokens are a great way that was invented several years ago to monetize open source and turn it into a free market instead of only a gift economy. Blockchain is the most widespread and proven way thus far to eliminate the middleman, and it’s th…
But you're not going to convince anyone to swap out VC funding for utility tokens by talking about Napster and FogBugz.
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> 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…
Or maybe 20 customers who believe that having a shared ship might form a join stock company to take care of their respective 5%... and when the venture proves itself, they might convert it to a publicly traded company and let it scale up with demand.
You might describe these people as "capitalizing a venture", in fact, or "venture capitalists".
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> 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.
At some point, you need the capital investment to build a big ship, and the return on that investment is zero unless you build the whole ship.
"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…
> Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. Any time I read an announcement like this I refresh my knowledge of competitors and make a mental note that it might be time to switch soon. > 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'…
It's not the same though because you're the end consumer in that scenario and there's no downside to the business disappearing tomorrow.
Instead, imagine if you built a restaurant serving food you get from Hello Fresh. How do you price your meals to ensure you're covering the true cost of you inputs? Can you compete with the guy down the street that isn't smart enough to realize part of their supply chain is being subsidized in an unsustainable way? Probably not.
The whole setup simply makes for bad economics IMO. I'm glad people in tech are finally catching on that VC money is the equivalent of an unsustainable, hidden subsidy that's difficult (or impossible) to calculate.
"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 prod…
I'm somewhat sympathetic to both the press and the readers here - they want to report/read news. Events. "Company X continues to exist" isn't really news. And "Company X adds new feature Y" is rarely noteworthy news, no matter how big a deal it is in Company X. Sometimes new features are news if either the company is huge ("Amazon adds support for Foo to AWSBar") or it's strategically significant ("Company X adds feature Y, now putting it in direct competition with Company Z"), but I think those are the exceptions.