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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#151

Post by nprateem »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #104
nprateem wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with big data I think most orgs (>80%) just don't need it due to the extra complexity. They might as well just use something managed like fargate and go back to building their own products.

IMO that's an overly reductive take, which is very common for tools in this space, but (I think) needs to be addressed so people stop repeating it. It reduces what "most orgs" are (as if 80% of businesses are the same, or solve the same problems, or have the same challenges, or use the same approaches, or have the same customers, have the same staff or expertise, budgets, timelines, etc, etc, etc.). Clearly there is…

I wasn't writing a critiqued essay. It's perfectly reasonable to assume 80% of orgs don't have the scale, core competencies or justifiable need to be managing container clusters themselves.

Also, no need to assume. I specifically said "use something managed".

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#152

Post by goalonetwo »

gk1 wrote: post #89
break_the_bank wrote: post #17

> The company was turning over double digit revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023. From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?

Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years. I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both…

Is that because as soon as you become a so-called security product you are now selling to the CISO org?

My experience with the CISO org is that they love buying expensive B2B enterprise products that have very limited real-life use-cases but are really good at checking boxes. That whole cloud-native security industry is full of FUD and fear-based selling to non technical organizations

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#153

Post by mooreds »

ushakov wrote: post #95
mooreds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no money in DevTools. MongoDB, Snyk and Auth0 might beg to differ. (I work for an Auth0 competitor.) > Businesses will see you as cost, not asset Isn't that true of any tool? How are devtools different (from a business perspective)?

The services you're describing (Databases, Security, Auth) have become commodities. This means cut throat competition. Most new players will not have enough to differentiate them from existing offerings

There's lots of money in commodities, though.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#155

Post by lmm »

Yasuraka wrote: post #85
benjaminwootton wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub actions must have eaten most of the DevOps tooling market. It’s pretty good and it’s fine for the vast majority of pipelines.

GH Actions is just CI, maybe crude CD, and not the best at that. It and (GitLab CI) ate Jenkins

Jenkins still does stuff that you can't do with GH Actions. Actions ate Travis / TeamCity / CircleCI, all the "more polished Jenkins for the 80% use case" products.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#156

Post by kjs3 »

propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a lo…

Another 'CEO' with "Everything was going AWESOME! Our numbers were great and getting BETTER! Our customers LOVED us! Buuut...we're closing shop, today. Totes sorry, bro.". Not a single mention of "because we managed cash like a drunken sailor and bet the farm on a singular exit event". The spin is making me a tad dizzy.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#157

Post by emseetech »

KaiserPro wrote: post #103
propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a lo…

> According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed. Because that is what startups do. 80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern You shoot for the moon, if you don't take massive risks, then you won't be rewarded. It sounded like they were about to be bought out or…

> Because that is what startups do

Feels like a ZIRP truism that we may be seeing challenged in real time.

The next wave of successful tech companies might be the ones who explore new business models that better fit the new circumstances.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#158

Post by lesam »

girvo wrote: post #128
ssharp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shoot for the moon" seems like a reasonable strategy when you're making the investment. However, certainly at some point while they were burning through that $36 million it became evident that "moon" was no longer a viable destination. Why wouldn't everyone be aligned with making the adjustments needed to get back to default alive? Something is clearly better than nothing. Now if it got to the stage where the CEO no…

> Something is clearly better than nothing. To you and I, this is patently obvious. This is not true however for VCs. In a lot of them, they'd prefer you fail entirely rather than limp along making 1x, 1.5x their investment. Zeroing out is preferable sometimes, weirdly.

Do you have any sense why this is true?

I get preferring (10x or 0x) to (1.5x). I don’t get preferring a near-certainty of 0x to some recovery of their capital with a pivot to selling a smaller-but-sustainable business.

Is it something like they’re measured by LP’s (or someone?) on only non-zeroed investments?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#159

Post by [deleted] »

alexitosrv wrote: post #107

In LinkedIn I also read some of their key people wrote a post with this wording for the announcement: "I americium precise bittersweet to denote – officially – that Weaveworks volition beryllium closing its doors and shutting down commercialized operations." and I almost had an stroke trying to parse it...

[deleted]

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#160

Post by yebyen »

lmm wrote: post #155
Yasuraka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GH Actions is just CI, maybe crude CD, and not the best at that. It and (GitLab CI) ate Jenkins

Jenkins still does stuff that you can't do with GH Actions. Actions ate Travis / TeamCity / CircleCI, all the "more polished Jenkins for the 80% use case" products.

What does Jenkins do that you can't do with GH Actions and Flux?
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