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VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#271

Post by borski »

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…

Sometimes it does work out. For example, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox, spun out as an open source project, and now has its own foundation backing it, along with a board, etc.

Most of the time, it doesn’t. But it can.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#274

Post by Shorn »

senordevnyc wrote: post #207
sophacles wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing. There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers. I don't quite get the distinction...

You paid for the hammer. Did you pay for Vite?

they will soon

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#275

Post by borski »

stackskipton wrote: post #129
freedomben wrote: post #126

> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes. Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record.…

>Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition. Cloudflare would be insane to allow that provision in the contract or acquisition documents. So I would take that promise as "will stay open source, blah blah blah, for now...."

Dropbox did it for Zulip.

It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#276

Post by try-working »

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

if it helps Cloudflare make it so that 20% of applications are built on their platform then that is definitely worth it

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#277

Post by JumpCrisscross »

drewda wrote: post #114
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

In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity. To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets. To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a stor…

> In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity

I’m seeing zero significant investor overlap between VoidZero and Cloudflare.

> VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios

Very few VCs do this. Andreessen stands out as the exception.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#278

Post by icemelt8 »

brikym wrote: post #248
valgaze wrote: post #135

"Vue.js: JavaScript MVVM made simple (vuejs.org)" February 3, 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169288 Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history. I have no idea what thi…

Similar story with Rich Harris of Svelte. He had no tech background but learned js to power data visualizations for his work in journalism.

This is the story with most frontend developers, they are not usually from a typical computer science background.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#279

Post by throw14082020 »

borski wrote: post #275
stackskipton wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition. Cloudflare would be insane to allow that provision in the contract or acquisition documents. So I would take that promise as "will stay open source, blah blah blah, for now...."

Dropbox did it for Zulip. It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.

Dropbox spun out Zulip because it was a failed project they were going to shut down.

This is completely different?

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#280

Post by meszmate »

Sponsorships are obviously not enough, and not every open source tool has some obvious hosting product to sell. A lot of this stuff is basically public infrastructure now, but we still fund it like a side project.
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