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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#221

Post by great_thanks »

purpleblue wrote: post #109
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…

Because no one that matters cares about a company that makes $10 million per year, neither the cofounders nor the board. Everyone wants 100x that because they want to become 9 figure wealthy or more. Better to close down, fuck the customers, and then have the cofounders start a new "journey" in hopes of getting that unicorn status and become fabulously wealthy.

i keep reading confounders...

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#222

Post by dgellow »

burningChrome wrote: post #123
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…

>> How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? I've worked at several startups who never cut costs, meanwhile they're burning through cash faster than an incinerator at the local trash company. I had one company CEO who remodeled our entire offices, got sky boxes for all the local sports teams (there were four of those) and made a point to tell…

> got sky boxes for all the local sports teams

What are those? Is it like a video game sky box, something you somehow attach to your ceiling to create a “sky” environment?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#223

Post by preisschild »

pmig wrote: post #210
alwyn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!

One if the decision points for us using Flux was the the helm controller. ArgoCD will just render the helm chart and apply the manifests. If you already habe an Helm Release in your cluster the migration path was easier with flux.

Not to mention that because of this, ArgoCD doesn't support some Helm functions at all, like `lookup` (which looks up resources in your cluster).

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#224

Post by arianvanp »

dgellow wrote: post #222
burningChrome wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? I've worked at several startups who never cut costs, meanwhile they're burning through cash faster than an incinerator at the local trash company. I had one company CEO who remodeled our entire offices, got sky boxes for all the local sports teams (there were four of those) and made a point to tell…

> got sky boxes for all the local sports teams What are those? Is it like a video game sky box, something you somehow attach to your ceiling to create a “sky” environment?

They're indoor VIP seatings the top of football stadiums with a panorama view of the entire field. It's usually where the sports commentators sit. Or rich people.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#225

Post by KaiserPro »

pdntspa wrote: post #199
KaiserPro wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> they required 200 people to get there. We really need to be casting more doubt on these assessments.

Oh indeed. But the problem is, you are the CEO, you are being told by your investors that you need more product market fit. This means selling more shit. PMF is the driver of value (we have x thousand/million/billion customers, therefore we are valuable)

That means you need more velocity. Which means more people.

More sales, more presales engineers, more subsidies to undercut the competition.

You have to remember that VCs are rarely there to make sustainable businesses, they are there to make valuable assets that can be sold. Even the nomenclature reflects this, startups are in batches. Because out of a set of 100, you expect 90 to fail after two years.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#226

Post by withinboredom »

I'm literally not surprised...

https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment...

And my comment: "Why would someone pay for something that is broken?"

If you only prioritize work for paying customers, and don't do things to grow ... you'll eventually die from attrition.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#227

Post by preisschild »

slgeorge wrote: post #84
lijok wrote: post #63

Pouring one out tonight. Weaveworks did some amazing work. Grafanalib has saved me months of work in the past.

Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.

Thanks from me too. So far I've only used Flux in my homelab only, but I found it far better than ArgoCD, which I use at work.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#228

Post by withinboredom »

sleepybrett wrote: post #124
stackskipton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably most popular thing they built was FluxCD if you are confused where you have heard their name before. Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.

People like the weave network policy controller too.. at least in the earlier days of kubernetes, their cni was pretty popular for awhile.

I think people got turned off from them when it came to light they had invented their own cryptography without doing any vetting that it was actually secure. At least, that’s why we moved away from it as quickly as possible with our reasoning being: “if someone is foolish enough to roll their own crypto, what else are they doing foolishly?”

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#229

Post by firecall »

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 had to search up what a Tail Event Startup was :-)

TIL a new term :-)

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#230

Post by yebyen »

lmm wrote: post #168
yebyen wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Based on the last time I looked: good handling of dependencies between builds (e.g. the ability to do an "edge build" where for any change in a given project, you check whether that will break your other projects when they upgrade to depend on that), advanced scheduling, plugins that integrate all sorts of random tools into your build views.

I have been away from Jenkins for a while, that all sounds like stuff I never used, (thanks!)
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