Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Weaveworks is shutting down

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 266 posts

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#211

Post by bboreham »

ShamelessC wrote: post #178

Can someone please explain what this company actually did? I’m not a cloud person per se, but I find it strange that I’ve never heard of them given the overwhelming number of people here who are familiar.

Outside of the Containers / Cloud Native world, not much. But they were the 10th-biggest contributor to Kubernetes as of 2020, which for a ~50-person company is something.

Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword.

Weaveworks created and/or substantially funded these Open Source projects:

- FluxCD

- Cortex (scalable Prometheus)

- Weave Net

- Weave Scope (seen in 2023 KubeCon keynote)

- EKSctl

- Kubeadm

- Kspan

Plus many others.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#212

Post by tsimionescu »

mad_vill wrote: post #13

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

> Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

As someone who works for a company that sells various k8s versions of products and services, we're only now seeing some of our bigger customers really starting to use k8s more exclusively. So at least my experience is the opposite of yours, it seems that at least in some industries k8s is only now seeing significant adoption.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#213

Post by jongjong »

streetcat1 wrote: post #122
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…

Because this is not what the VC wants. The VCs are diversified across many startups and frankly make most of their money from tail event startups in their portfolio (e.g. Uber / Facebook). Since they don't know which startup will be the tail event, they don't want a profitable business, but a max growing business. This is different from the bootstrap model.

I know this is the case but I wonder if this is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I can easily imagine an alternate reality where VCs invest more thoughtfully based on more careful analysis of companies and they would have a much higher success rate and end up with even higher returns without creating unsustainable wealth inequality.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#214

Post by LunaSea »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #71
ralph84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian’s market cap is $55 billion. GitLab’s market cap is $11 billion. GitHub sold for $7.5 billion in 2018. There’s money, you just have to be more than a point solution.

Wow, didn't know that about Gitlab. Here's a source[0] for that claim in case anyone else wanted to know. Seems a bit high imo but what do I know? [0] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/gtlb More info here: https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2021-10-13-gitlab-an... https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/

Yes, Gitlab is way evaluation is way overpriced. They're not even in the green yet.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#215

Post by PeterisP »

wbl wrote: post #196
senderista wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, due to their large bankroll and diversified position, VCs can afford to be risk-neutral and only care about expected returns. Founders and employees obviously cannot be risk-neutral, ergo startups are a great bet for a VC and a terrible bet for anyone else.

The amount of VC-founder side deals that are possible is pretty shocking. Stuff like letting them cash out early.

I don't really see why such a side deal would be possible - if the VC goal is to get the founder-manager to try for that narrow hope of few percent of major success and discourage them from settling for a lower-value stable business, allowing the founders to cash out would be counterproductive, it's in the VCs interests to ensure that founders personal financial motivation is aligned to theirs, that the founders are also motivated to go big or go bust.

In essence, if the startup is slowing down and perhaps not going anywhere, then the standard existing deal with founders where the founders can cash out only if they enable to VCs cash out at a profit (for example, if they manage to pull out all the stops to make a failing startup look attractive to some bigger fool) is exactly what VCs want, and in such a situation the founders have no leverage to extract a compromise that's worse for VCs.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#216

Post by tsimionescu »

api wrote: post #11
dilyevsky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you need to be doing at least part services play - product alone doesn’t cut it

A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either. Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's pr…

Honestly, I think any software business model where you're not paying an explicit monthly/yearly sum is more deceitful for B2B.

No business wants to use a software product that is not being actively maintained, so even if you get sold a perpetual license to "own" a version of the product, you will keep going back to the same vendor to get new versions. So, you are actually still paying a periodic fee, just maybe with capex instead of opex. And if the vendor goes out of business, you'll have to start moving to a new product, so you didn't really "own" the software any more than if you had been paying an explicit rent on it.

Now, SaaS where you are sending all your data to the company's servers is probably one step too far, for various other reasons. But perpetual licenses are generally a bigger scam than periodic ones for business software.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#217

Post by bostik »

gtirloni wrote: post #53
dilyevsky wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re cheap until the management realizes they just spent a year (so like $300k) educating their devops how cni works and they bounced to faang or some other startup so the project needs to be scrapped or restaffed again and started over. That’s where the services come in. Also yeah it’s well known ICs view saas as direct threat so everyone tries to skip them and go directly to KDM. That’s the reason nearly all ent…

I think the comment you're replying to meant to say developers are cheap in the sense they allergic to spending money, not that their time/salary is cheap. Example: "John is a cheap bastard. He never spends any money or buys the cheapest options".

It's not just the money, it's all the things around using corporate money. Procurement is its own level of hell. Dealing with (or even having to think about) vendors' sales critters is a drain on brain cycles. The frustration of "call us" pricing structures.

Or if you want to combine all of the above: perfectly functional but artificially gated features.

If you could pay for a service that GUARANTEES the vendor does not allow their sales people anywhere near your details, that might change things.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#218

Post by catherinecodes »

yebyen wrote: post #137
catherinecodes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Flux was a handy little tool[1] that sync'd yaml manifests in git repos to live clusters. The concept was fascinating, and the tool was well done--small and efficient. Easy to learn. In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3]. The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps n…

Sudden? We finally archived the repo at the end of 2022. https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/ I was hired to support Flux v1 two years after the events you described, in the beginning of 2021 to go on supporting Flux v1 until we could get everyone off the boat. (I worked at Weaveworks until last month, and I'm still a Flux maintainer! Keep the Flux talk in Present tense please! ;-)

Yes, present tense is more appropriate. Best of luck to you on what's next.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#220

Post by jbu »

mad_vill wrote: post #13

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

I know a bit of the history with this one.

Back in the day there was a smaller consultancy with awesome developers called LShift (mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City). They worked out that an open source messaging thing would be useful, and created RabbitMQ (there were details about who, how it was funded internally, etc). That got sold to VMWare, and a bunch of people went with it, but LShift went on as before, happy, but always looking for another Rabbit. Didn't find one, was aquihired in the end.

Meanwhile, some of the Rabbit people formed Weave, looking for the killer business around the early container ecosystem (https://www.weave.works/oss/net/ was interesting, eksctl, flux, CNCF, lots of good things). But I guess they took a bite of the VC apple and sustainable technical contributions was no longer the goal.

I've huge respect for everyone I knew from Weave. Great people all. Best wishes and I know you'll land on your feet.

Post reply on HN