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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#191

Post by KptMarchewa »

dadrian wrote: post #172
Solvency wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simpl…

You raise money to pay for costs of running the business. If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in multiple regions. Good luck getting even four regions for less than $1M. The world would be far worse off if all tech businesses had to be bootstrapped. That being said, there's c…

To add to it, without external funding _any_ innovation would be stifled by existing players. If you can't even get low millions in funding, existing corporations with tens of billions of free money will eat you alive.

Organically growing a business; bootstrapping sounds fine, until you try to do something that potentially has any global impact.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#192

Post by oneneptune »

tptacek wrote: post #25
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "raised money" post. So presumably they raised money so they can have a database answer in the future.

We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people, and the platform strategy is to build durable storage primitives that work for as many different databases as possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.

a bit off topic, but a big struggle that is growing related to data and databases; managing data residency. I've not found an easy way to handle this and countries seem to be passing more and more laws... it's tough for global applications!

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#193

Post by dmix »

Solvency wrote: post #122
esteth wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you want to do. If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.

There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D. It's trivial to imagine how a responsible incremental funding approach could create a better, more transparent, more estimable, more reportable, more mappable, more rigorously trackable innovation process. Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION.…

I'm curious have you ever tried to raise money for a tech business before?

There's a big reason VC and angels were and largely continue to be only game in town. No one understands or would risk loaning millions of dollars on a high risk business aiming for marginal incremental growth.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#194

Post by vlovich123 »

dadrian wrote: post #172
Solvency wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a better product and business specifically. It's simply the de facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this process. It is well defined, well established, and simpl…

You raise money to pay for costs of running the business. If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in multiple regions. Good luck getting even four regions for less than $1M. The world would be far worse off if all tech businesses had to be bootstrapped. That being said, there's c…

You can offset burn rate with more skills. Putting a few machines in multiple regions is fairly cheap. If you’re ok doing the ops yourself, you can get buy on a shoe string budget. I know. A startup I was part of did this ten years ago and the tooling to do this has only gotten easier and better.

To be clear, I’m not saying that venture is intrinsically evil, but also companies are explicitly trading off higher burn rates and higher raise rounds to reduce the need to build all of this in house. That’s not a bad idea because it’s usually better for the business to scale as quickly as the sales channel can fill it rather than be stuck on difficult engineering roadblocks.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#195

Post by renewiltord »

Electricniko wrote: post #137
renewiltord wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why someone comes to a startup incubator and VC forum when they hate venture funded startups. You know what YC does, right? There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise? Why? It's just baffling behavior.

Not OP, but I think the answer is that a lot of people who quit Reddit a couple weeks ago have spread out to other news/discussion forums to find something to replace it. They're still in the exploration phase trying to find communities that resemble subreddits they used. The content on this forum sort of resembles a few tech related subreddits, even if the discussions and intent are quite different.

I suppose the community makes the purpose of the community. And this sort of thing makes me worse, so I should seek something else, or modify my interaction with this community.

It's an open forum and presumably those running it prefer this outcome.

Fair enough.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#196

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

>once you’ve monopolized your particular market?

How can you monopolize this market? There is no moat here at all. There are already trillion dollar companies competing here. They are selling a commodity.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#197

Post by electroly »

mrkurt wrote: post #102
styren wrote: post #83

I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 pe…

I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers…

The part I don't understand is the combination of these statements you posted today:

> there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power.

> We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to

> the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins

How do these square up? How can you reliably maintain good margins if your competitors set your prices? And your competitors have the scale to, for instance, design and manufacture their own hardware rather than buying off-the-shelf chips.

I would think the key would be not to accept being a commodity whose prices can be directly compared with other hosters.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#198

Post by renewiltord »

fnimick wrote: post #116
renewiltord wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why someone comes to a startup incubator and VC forum when they hate venture funded startups. You know what YC does, right? There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise? Why? It's just baffling behavior.

It may be a VC forum, but it functions as a broad technical forum. How many posts here are explicitly about startup economics? It's important to remind people in the broader technical community that financial success should not the only goal, nor should it be required to maximize profit at the expense of customers.

Fair enough. It's not you, it's me. I'll just not interact with these comments in future. I have a mechanism to fix this.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#200

Post by [deleted] »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

[deleted]
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