121–130 of 133 posts
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It’s very hard to have solid product, engineering, marketing, sales, and support on any scale without taking VC money.
not really necessary to have a solid product, on the contrary. VC money bring unreliable and not always user first agenda.
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TIL. I thought they were entirely bootstrapped.
Yeah. I learned that after he responded to one of my posts....
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Yeah. I learned that after he responded to one of my posts....
Yev here -> yes, we have one VC backer from 2012. We wrote a post about it that sheds a bit of light on why (Thailand flooding played a major role): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-raises-5-million-wh... . TL/DR we have a capital-heavy business and the $2.5m cash infusion helped us weather hard drive prices going up 3x overnight.
Also of note, unlike Dropbox, Backblaze was able to release a new slightly more enterprisey product - B2 - without losing focus on the main product.
On the other hand, it does take a certain amount of 'privilege" (yes I hate that word, couldn't think of a better one) to have five founders who could afford to not take a salary for a year....
But one criticism, any time you post a link to the Backblaze blog it should come with a warning. It quickly led me down a TVTropes type rabbit hole of reading more interesting articles.....
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Maybe "products" are actually bad when they lock you into an ecosystem like the company Steve Jobs headed does.
It's true, Apple has deviously engineered it so their operating systems only run applications written for those operating systems. It's a good thing nobody else does that!
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Yev here -> yes, we have one VC backer from 2012. We wrote a post about it that sheds a bit of light on why (Thailand flooding played a major role): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-raises-5-million-wh... . TL/DR we have a capital-heavy business and the $2.5m cash infusion helped us weather hard drive prices going up 3x overnight.
This is very relevant to the discussion about Dropbox - which I really don't expect you to respond to being they are sort of a competitor (yeah I know -- not really https://www.backblaze.com/blog/sync-vs-backup-vs-storage/ ). But, how BackBlaze decided to run their business (bootstrapping) and how Dropbox decided to run theirs (VC backed early on and still not profitable), is the perfect example of how taking on VC f…
Hah! That's a good thing! As for VC vs. Bootstrap - our five founders all worked together previously at a company that raised VC funds and while they weren't made millionaires from that company, it did give them enough cushion to go without salary for a bit. Originally it wasn't supposed to be 2 years though, so when it started to drag out there were definitely some...uncomfortable times, but they pulled through them. That's not say that we HATE the VC model - it definitely works for a lot of companies out here, but there is something nice about being able to choose your own adventure.
Re: Dropbox as a competitor -> You hit it, they kind of are, but I think that's mostly because people don't really know enough about how things work to tell the difference. Part of what I do with the Backblaze consumer service is a lot of education on why you should use both :)
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B2C is the place to be - it is a niche where an excellent product is going to continue to earn excellent money. Continue to reiterate and continue to improve the product, dont overspend on infrastructure and dont rent super expensive office space in the most expensive cities in the world. Enterprise is where SaaS companies go to die because they think that Microsofts of the world are just going to let them have the m…
I struggle to connect this to market facts. What big consumer SaaS tools exist? You could argue that Spotify and Netflix count. I disagree, but fine. You have networks like Tinder. You have a few tools companies like Carbonite, Dropbox, 1Password. These are niche. In the enterprise... Slack, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, Qualtrics, Datadog, Zoom, I feel like I could name 10 more easily. Enterprise is where SaaS companies get…
SmugMug. Carbonite. Mailchimp. Backblaze. It is quite literally, pick a niche and there's a company making money servicing that niche. Is it a billion dollar company? Nope. Will it ever be if it sticks to doing whatever the product that it had? Who knows. But are they going to lose money on "enterprise" while cannibalizing its B2C business? Pretty much guaranteed.
Remember Borland? The one that created a market for $100 compilers it sold millions copies? It decided to replace those millions of customers paying $100 with a hundred customers paying a million? That was a total reversal of fortunes.
> Enterprise is where SaaS companies get paid. Slack makes like half their revenue from 500 companies.
And it still cannot make money.
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This is very relevant to the discussion about Dropbox - which I really don't expect you to respond to being they are sort of a competitor (yeah I know -- not really https://www.backblaze.com/blog/sync-vs-backup-vs-storage/ ). But, how BackBlaze decided to run their business (bootstrapping) and how Dropbox decided to run theirs (VC backed early on and still not profitable), is the perfect example of how taking on VC f…
> It quickly led me down a TVTropes type rabbit hole of reading more interesting articles..... Hah! That's a good thing! As for VC vs. Bootstrap - our five founders all worked together previously at a company that raised VC funds and while they weren't made millionaires from that company, it did give them enough cushion to go without salary for a bit. Originally it wasn't supposed to be 2 years though, so when it sta…
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I used rsync to mirror one encrypted 14TB drive to another one. It took ~2 weeks. I wouldn't call rsync "good enough".
Something is very, very wrong then. rsync will use 100% of the bandwidth provided. It won't be any slower than anything else you might try over the same network. If you found that to be the case, it's almost certainly something else.
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Yes, this. Them ending support for ecryptfs filesystems (they used to support it) is the main reason I'm considering ending my subscription soon. They took a massive step backward there and I am not happy about having to move my entire Dropbox directory to an unencrypted part of the filesystem.
They rolled back those changes - they support quite a few filesystems again now. See the Linux section of https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste...