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VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#171

Post by runtime_terror »

burcs wrote: post #137
olingern wrote: post #98

These acquisition announcements always leave me uneasy. There’s a lot of hand waving, “nothing will change and our roadmap will stay the same!” but we can all do basic math and understand that’s not how business works. As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Ver…

sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx. sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into

The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.

For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.

One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#172

Post by bflesch »

debarshri wrote: post #108
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #83

So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant

Acquisition happen for 3 reasons. 1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product. In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team. You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.

Your listing is not exhaustive - startups can also be acquired for politics, for marketing purposes, whatever. There is a lot of meat space things going on in the upper echelons of the US tech industry.

Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#176

Post by runtime_terror »

arm32 wrote: post #167
gonzalohm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you like about Cloudfare? Do you like the centralization of the internet?

My issue with Cloudflare is how they enshittify all the open-source & closed-soure utilities they maintain. They vibe code it all now. It's crap. I'm sad Vite/Vue/whatever will go the way of that. Oh well, there's always Svelte. For now.

Vercel hired the Svelte team so I'm not too sure there's much of a difference

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29189144

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#177

Post by bix6 »

overfeed wrote: post #151
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #83

So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant

> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company. In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.

Not necessarily. There are likely key person clauses in the prior round docs.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#178

Post by bix6 »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #113
stackskipton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is investors are getting a good return on investment so they are probably pretty happy.

They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea [0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about

Presumably that $12M A was around $50M Val so they need to sell for substantially more to give investors a multiple return.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#179

Post by throwup238 »

bix6 wrote: post #178
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea [0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about

Presumably that $12M A was around $50M Val so they need to sell for substantially more to give investors a multiple return.

Unless the investors have liquidation preference where they see their multiple before anyone else sees a dime.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#180

Post by Maiko11 »

All of them are getting acquired nothing bad in that but I feel like the path to revenue with open source just isn't viable anymore. You have to build your own platform like vercel, or build great dev tools like mintlify
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