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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#361

Post by maliker »

ignoramous wrote: post #353
maliker wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. They're leaps and bounds better than the container services on AWS and Azure, solidly better than the GCP one. Seems like they could sell to get their exits before too long. Although I would be very happy if they had the pain tolerance to continue as their own company.

> Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. (not privy to inside information) As a customer that would be a catastrophic outcome. Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than most given the founding team has already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell out again.

flyctl getting rolled into aws cli (or boto3 shudder) would definitely hurt

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#362

Post by short_sells_poo »

aeyes wrote: post #346
kkielhofner wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cloudflare also depends on investor money, they haven't made a profit ever and continue to just throw stuff at the wall to grow. At some point in time they'll have to start thinking about profitability.

It's important to qualify this though. E.g. Amazon was not profitable for a very long time, but only because they furiously reinvested everything. They could've turned profitable at any time.

Assuming Cloudflare is a similar case to Amazon: ie they could turn profitable at any time but choose to reinvest those profits immediately into more business, that is a very good spot to be in.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#363

Post by esafak »

logifail wrote: post #358
esafak wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means you can pick them without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales.

> without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales ... except "once it scales", you realise that you're paying through the nose for cloud services "because growth", so you end up looking at on-prem again, and finally decide it's better value?

At that scale you have discounted multi-year agreements. It's a good problem to have.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#365

Post by ignoramous »

Scarbutt wrote: post #30

Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.

Running (diskless) production workloads on Fly.io since 2021 (300+ req/sec across 30+ regions). Sure you ran into problems almost every month back then, but not anymore. Not in my experience.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#366

Post by snowwrestler »

hugs wrote: post #313
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 prod…

To reporters, funding is 3rd-party validation that a business is actually worth writing about.

Just like press coverage is 3rd-party validation to potential customers that a company is actually worth considering.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#367

Post by veave »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #170
mrkurt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers…

How hard is it to hire people who understand how a physical server even works these days? Probably most engineers under 40 have never touch a physical machine, under 30 maybe have never seen an ethernet cable...

I suppose you are being facetious because what you said sounds absurd.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#368

Post by sebastiennight »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #298
ultrasaurus wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't wrong that there are some companies that feel more comfortable if you have more money in the bank BUT most companies wildly overestimate how much prospects care. Case studies in their industry & Gartner quadrant > $100MM in the bank. TL;DR: It's an appendix slide in your first meeting deck, don't put it up front :)

After the SVB collapse, hopefully they have the $100MM as $250K in 4000 different bank accounts to duck under those FDIC insurance limits.

That would be $1 billion :-)

So I guess 400 bank accounts would be enough?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#369

Post by lightbendover »

pests wrote: post #344
cnity wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of whether "the edge" takes off will come down to whether or not the culture at large will swallow the illusion at its heart. You cannot remove the concept of a region any more than you can remove the concept of "the computer" in a cloud environment.

> any more than you can remove the concept of "the computer" in a cloud environment But that's just not true. Tons of cloud services completely abstract the computer out of the picture. You are paying for capacity or throughput as an abstract unit of cost and the cloud configures as many computers as needed to run your request. You never interact with anything resembling a computer in this situation.

Except, you always interact with computerS no matter what provider or architecture you use. It's inescapable as long as you're doing business in software. The trade-offs in architecture and regionality do NOT go away just because a company abstracts over it. They may be able to set up read replicas and consensus on the fly and be able to detect when various approaches make the most sense, but you are still at the mercy of the accompanying constraints. For most use cases, none of this may matter. When you do run into a use case where it matters, you should be fully aware of what trade-offs you're making and have control over them.

Not to mention, regions matter when you're serious. GDPR/DSA/DMA/India/China -- the list goes on. Certain data must live in certain bubbles.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#370

Post by wferrell »

tptacek wrote: post #127
mrkurt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers…

I was hoping Kurt was going to do an extended spiel on hardware margins and bandwidth pricing. You should keep needling him for this, because it's super interesting.

Please Kurt!
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