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Tailscale has raised $160M

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#171

Post by lukeholder »

kenrose wrote: post #130
chubot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm OK well thinking out loud, $100M / 3 is $33M / year? I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company, but I thought it was mostly a software company? I would imagine that salaries are the main cost, and revenue could cover salaries? (seems like they have a solid model - https://tailscale.com/pricing ) I'm sure they have some cloud fees, but I thought it was mostly "control plane" an…

You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll. A few other things: 1. Go-to-market costs Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, conte…

[flagged]

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#172

Post by jychang »

Uzmanali wrote: post #170

Tailscale just got a lot of money to keep growing. But what they are doing is more important than the money. They are helping computers talk to each other in an easy and safe way. Before, the internet was built to connect places, not people. That made things messy. People had to set up tricky stuff like VPNs and firewalls. Tailscale makes this much easier by using your name or account, not just numbers like IP addres…

This comment reads like simple.wikipedia.org

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#173

Post by sebastiennight »

fidotron wrote: post #49
baq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would hope they’d create something like Google drive except you own your stuff that people would pay for.

So you want a file system data store that distributes the data over the nodes you own in a sort of dynamic P2P way?

Sounds like Pied Piper to me.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#174

Post by Uzmanali »

jychang wrote: post #172
Uzmanali wrote: post #170

Tailscale just got a lot of money to keep growing. But what they are doing is more important than the money. They are helping computers talk to each other in an easy and safe way. Before, the internet was built to connect places, not people. That made things messy. People had to set up tricky stuff like VPNs and firewalls. Tailscale makes this much easier by using your name or account, not just numbers like IP addres…

This comment reads like simple.wikipedia.org

Haha, fair point! I guess i was going for simple Wikipedia rather than deep academic journal. Maybe next time i'll throw in some fancy words just to spice things up.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#175

Post by dblohm7 »

lukeholder wrote: post #171
kenrose wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll. A few other things: 1. Go-to-market costs Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, conte…

[flagged]

I can confirm that kenrose is an actual human being :-)

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#176

Post by raggi »

baq wrote: post #26
otterley wrote: post #6

How is Tailscale going to achieve at least $1B in annual revenue? That’s the kind of promise that would have to be made to investors in order to raise funding of this magnitude.

One would hope they’d create something like Google drive except you own your stuff that people would pay for.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#177

Post by transpute »

codethief wrote: post #143
transpute wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operant has something similar in IIoT, https://operantnetworks.com/sie-sbd-part2/ 1. Immutable Content Naming: In a data-centric system, content is addressed by its name, transcending geographical considerations. This circumvents the vulnerabilities associated with IP addresses, which can be spoofed or manipulated. By employing cryptographic techniques to validate the authenticity of content names, NDN establishes a…

This is about data, though, not about addresses, is it?

It's both, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

> NDN has its roots in an earlier project, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which Van Jacobson first publicly presented in 2006.. NDN applications name data and data names will directly be used in network packet forwarding.. Its premise is that the Internet is primarily used as an information distribution network, which is not a good match for IP, and that the future Internet's "thin waist" should be based on named data rather than numerically addressed hosts.

NDN talk by Van Jacobson at Google (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#178

Post by hug »

andruby wrote: post #148
MrDarcy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. What exactly do think companies are spending 500k on per engineer beyond the TC package?

HR, marketing, sales, management, office space, servers, licenses, insurance, etc. It seems on the high end, but not too unrealistic.

It’s wildly and hugely unrealistic.

The rule of thumb that employees actually cost a business roughly twice their salary is based on two things:

1. Retention. Hiring costs are “huge”, and so if you have a higher or lower average retention, may make up a disproportionate cost compared to salary. Ramp up time and institutional knowledge loss is no joke either.

2. A spread of average wages. 500k is not average, and a huge number of the costs are relatively fixed. $1,000 a month worth of software licensing isn’t an uncommon number and is fully 1/3 of the salary of a $3k a month or $36k/year junior clerk. It’s peanuts when you look at it next to a $500k/year salary. It may be that the clerk is, all in, costing the company 3x their salary after indemnity insurance and so on. The dev will never reach 10%.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#180

Post by groby_b »

api wrote: post #136
pomatic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they raised the 100M three years ago, I'm pretty sure they said they didn't need it and were saving it for a rainy day (or words to that effect), always seemed very odd at the time. Two q's for anyone who cares to speculate: have they burnt the original investment already? And if not, why would they need more funding? AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today, the only thing…

You can't raise VC money and save it for a rainy day. If VCs wanted their money in a bank they'd just put it in a bank. If you raise $100M you have to put $100M to work or you'll hear constant shit from your board over it. If they raised $160M they're going to spend $160M on something. My guess would be a lot of enterprise features and product integrations.

That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%."

With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking)

And if you read the Series C post, you'd know what they're spending on - GPU (and general) cloud interconnectivity.

There's really not much need to guess, Tailscale's financing announcements are about as open as you can get.

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