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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#241

Post by yebyen »

yencabulator wrote: post #52

> and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023 That is a curious KPI.

It makes sense if you take in context that Flux, the most visible and well-known product of Weaveworks, is a donated CNCF open source project, and that companies like Microsoft, VMWare, AWS – can all engage with it directly, or by forking, or by building support for it directly into their own products.

How do you place a value on Microsoft building Flux into Azure Arc? I know it isn't worth $0 but do they actually need a contract with anybody (at Flux or Weaveworks) in order to go on doing that - no. They don't need one.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#242

Post by yebyen »

johann8384 wrote: post #179

So what's going to happen to the sock shop now?

LOL you'll have to get your socks somewhere else. The microservices demo is officially deprecated and archived:

https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo

I have seen others are still using it but not officially from anyone at Weaveworks

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#244

Post by TuringTest »

jongjong wrote: post #213
streetcat1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Unlikely. The problem of that view is that, when you're handling large uncertainty, you don't know which projects are the ones you should cancel and which ones to nurture. Past performance is a terrible indicator for lucky shots.

See the Talent-Luck simulation for instance.[1] You measure a population of projects affected affected by random events and profiting proportionally to talent, and the projects that end better off are the ones that chain multiple beneficial lucky strikes, with talent having little influence past a minimum level.

And the way to maximise gains over the whole population is setting a small flat subsidy for all, allowing everybody to explore their talent even after a wrong turn.

1 https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-your...

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#245

Post by abhiyerra »

spicyusername wrote: post #232
goalonetwo wrote: post #150

That whole CloudNative industry seems to be going downhill since the end of the free-money era. It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S. But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.

I've worked with Kubernetes extensively since it became popular. Of the maybe hundred of companies I've worked with trying to onboard to Kubernetes, I don't think a single one really had a use case that justified the increased complexity. Kubernetes seems so great until you're suddenly drowning in YAML, un-upgraded clusters out of their support window, the need for an unbelievable amount of extra tooling (e.g. ArgoCD…

You don't actually need most of that additional tech. Github Actions + Managed Kubernetes + Helm is solid. Everything else can be additive as needed. ArgoCD is largely useful for deploying to multi single tenant customer installations, but overkill if you have a single prod cluster for example.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#246

Post by paulddraper »

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?

Box seats, but with a view of the sky.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#247

Post by araes »

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…

Incentives. Lots of incentive to ride the horse to death while the money's still available. You get free stuff, get to live the high life, gain celebrity, get interviewed, make social media posts people pay attention to, get invited to fancy parties like Davos. No bad publicity.

Probably get more money on the next startup as a result. WeWork is an excellent example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/business/dealbook/adam-ne...

In a lot of cases, it seems like the real incentive is "pretend to have a really desirable product, make demo after demo to draw in investment, party as much as you can while pretending to make something, lateral to the next company while claiming external market conditions." Live the Wolf of Wall St. life while the Titanic sinks.

Still think the main Pokemon advancement for companies is mostly -> Bankemon -> Casinomon

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#248

Post by dfltr »

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…

> Potemkin unicorn.

Thank you for putting these two words together, they're perfect.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#249

Post by Negitivefrags »

mcherm wrote: post #165
axiak wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they received $36 MM in a fundraise 3 years ago, you better believe that those investors put pressure on the business to grow fast or die trying. Those investors are not looking for a somewhat risky medium % return, they're looking for each company to have a small % chance of being a unicorn.

So who out there is running an investment fund that's looking to make a much more reasonable rate of return off successful but slowly growing companies? Because I would put money into that fund.

You probably want the kind of private equity funds that do succession transactions.

Small slow growing businesses tend not to actually need capital very often, so there isn't exactly a huge market for investing in them.

On the other hand, you get a lot of businesses whose owners are getting old / sick of the business. They need somebody to buy them out and install a new management structure.

There are a bunch of funds who do things like that. Look for "Private Equity" as a more broad category rather than just "Venture Capital".

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#250

Post by yebyen »

nprateem wrote: post #151
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

IMO "use something managed" gets reduced to "we shan't run Kubernetes on-premises" which ends up meaning "we won't learn anything about failure modes until it's too late to think about mitigating them"

Which might be in line with what you said about

> 80% of orgs don't have the scale, core competencies or justifiable need to be managing container clusters themselves.

But also, would at least have some potential to be solved and much more cost effectively, or maybe at least grown past, if they would just spend some energy on deploying Kubernetes internally; even if we can't or won't afford an entire team dedicated to doing only that, (and even if we commit to using only managed services for production anywhere and everywhere.)

In my experience the way some places reflexively avoid it like it's a trap to be stayed out of, winds up being a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy "we're not doing Kubernetes" - I empathize with the person who you triggered, even if now we're up to two walls of text from just a simple comment, I feel triggered too.

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