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Tailscale raises $100M

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#5
"To paraphrase Larry Wall, Tailscale makes easy things easy" .. Indeed, I run multiple devices via two regionally separated homes and two cheap VPS's .. RaspberryPi, Linux, MacOS and an iPhone all able to communicate effortlessly thanks to TS

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#7
Tailscale is my favorite (product) discovery of 2022. I initially set it up to use as a VPN to get around a misbehaving corporate firewall and accidentally realized it solved a whole bunch of other problems I didn't realize I had. Usually a new product doesn't even live up to the intended use case and so TS is really anomalous IMHO in how good it is.

- SSH'ing into a raspberry pi I have at home that does random IoT stuff.

- Accessing servers on my local dev machine from other devices for testing (i.e. a Windows box or phone)

- Giving access to production bastion devices without publicly exposing anything to the internet.

And best of all I don't have to fiddle with the usual networking stuff. It just works. Kudos on the raise!

Non-disclaimer: I have no relation to anyone on the team. Tailscale is just a delight to use.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#8
I know it was supposed to be a funny throwaway line, but I am irked by the "with $100 million you could interrupt the Super Bowl for 7 full minutes." That's not how sports advertising runs works. You are bidding on a limited amount of space determined by the game. I think there is also a non-linear cost.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#9
With such a huge investment comes the obligation to eventually pay it back. Is this another one of my favourite tools going the way of Dropbox, 1Password and all other companies that were formed around what should be a platform feature, which took on way too large investment sums and were eventually forced to become the everything, losing sight of their core values?

I sincerely hope not, but there's so much bad precedent.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#10
> For people who believe there’s a catch — and most still do — then I don’t know how to write a blog post or hire a marketing or sales team to change their minds.

I think the catch is that (at least at the free level) one must trust an identity providers. For many companies that's probably fair enough, but for high-security companies and private individuals one absolutely cannot trust anything running outside of one's physical control. Service providers can be suborned, either legally by corrupt regimes or illegally by employees. There is no way that I would permit Google, Microsoft or GitHub (their three supported options) to gate access to my private devices.

I think that one must also trust Tailscale themselves, although I could be wrong about that.

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