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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#251

Post by goalonetwo »

gtirloni wrote: post #163
goalonetwo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the end of the free money era, a lot of people are rightly questioning the microservice/k8s/cloud-native model that requires you to run an operation team of 20 people and has a baseline cost of 200k$/year for a cluster that doesn't do anything yet.

It really doesn't and you won't get anything useful out of any discussion by making these exaggerations.

Are you working for a vendor?

I have worked in multiple orgs that standardized on Kubernetes as end users. Those numbers are coming from my real life experience. If we include all costs it is actually probably way higher than 200k per cluster.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#252

Post by jongjong »

TuringTest wrote: post #244
jongjong wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 performa…

>> 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.

I don't think that's what VCs did. It looks more like they dumped millions of funding on a tiny number of hand-picked companies and used short term traction as the main metric and they equated profitability as anti-growth, failing to realize that, without demanding profits, growth could be produced artificially using money/advertising and that it doesn't mean that users actually want to use the product in the long run.

Profitability is how you know that users want to use a product; otherwise a company could just 'launder' investment money to their users somehow and of course nobody will refuse free surplus value and hence they will attract users... Until the investment money runs out and the surplus value stops being handed out to users.

Just think of Uber investors subsidizing rides as an example, as soon as that subsidy goes away, there's a good chance it will start declining. Uber is still unprofitable.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#253

Post by cetico »

jongjong wrote: post #252
TuringTest wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 performa…

>> 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. I don't think that's what VCs did. It looks more like they dumped millions of funding on a tiny number of hand-picked companies and used short term traction as the main metric and they equated profitability as anti-growth, failing to realize that, with…

Wait, I thought Uber became profitable last year and remained so..?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#254

Post by tmnvix »

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…

It's a naive point of view, I know, but I often wonder how a business could function if wages and salaries were considered to be profit. This is clear enough for an individual running a business, or even a family operation.

For larger businesses would it be possible without adopting an extreme socialist (or even communist) approach? If so, how would you balance this with the interests of investors/owners (i.e. people that aren't involved in the operation of the business)? Would the businesses be more or less sustainable on average? Does the very existence of outside investors necessitate categorising wages and salaries as a cost?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#255

Post by ShamelessC »

bboreham wrote: post #237
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what do you pay them money for? What problems do they solve for you?

The first monetization strategy was a SaaS 'Weave Cloud' providing monitoring and GitOps tools. Then commercial versions of some OSS projects. Probably consultancy was the biggest revenue source overall.

I’m more confused now ha. So they had a killer developer first culture but very little recognition otherwise? Sounds to me like they forgot what the purpose of having a company is.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#256

Post by BobbyTables2 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #103
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…

> 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…

I’m pretty sure the way to slow down a highly productive group of 20-50 is to quadruple their size.

I’ve never seen a team of 100 developers do anything quickly. Motivated teams of 10-20 can do amazing things.

Some scale is needed, but 100 people working for 1 year cannot accomplish that of 10 people for 10 years.

The irony is they could have kept headcount low, and used the $$ millions to do amazing things for years. Instead it is torched for bragging rights.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#257

Post by wbl »

PeterisP wrote: post #215
wbl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The typical situation is the company has been around for a few years and the founder has some reasonable sounding expenses. Then the next round includes some cashing out as new investors join.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#258

Post by nprateem »

yebyen wrote: post #250
nprateem wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is basically a build vs buy discussion. Businesses have generally concluded they should only build things that give them a strategic advantage and buy other services to maintain focus on their sources of competitive advantage. Eg in the case of k8s, it's not just spinning it up, it's securing it, patching, monitoring, etc. It's for this reason the majority of orgs shouldn't run it themselves.

However some balance is needed. Orgs may want to do exploration since it may not be obvious where competitive advantage can come from, or like you say perhaps hybrid makes sense, using it only in non prod.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#259

Post by KaiserPro »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #256
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…

I’m pretty sure the way to slow down a highly productive group of 20-50 is to quadruple their size. I’ve never seen a team of 100 developers do anything quickly. Motivated teams of 10-20 can do amazing things. Some scale is needed, but 100 people working for 1 year cannot accomplish that of 10 people for 10 years. The irony is they could have kept headcount low, and used the $$ millions to do amazing things for years…

We are, of course, assuming that they grew the main dev group to 100, rather than creating a new team, for a new product.

The biggest issue is that product and project management isn't taught well. There isn't a wealth of easy to understand literature. The stuff thats available tends to be LLM level waffle.

you can hire consultants, but they also tend to speak in business vague, without offering specific advice.

Sadly, what you need are experienced PMs, lead engineers and business types. They are hard to find, and tend to come late to startups.

It is possible to grow a company from 25 devs to 100 and keep velocity. But it requires planning, clear communication and clear process to make sure that people are not spinlocking or re-inventing the wheel. I know its possible, because I've been at a place that's done it.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#260

Post by yebyen »

nprateem wrote: post #258
yebyen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is basically a build vs buy discussion. Businesses have generally concluded they should only build things that give them a strategic advantage and buy other services to maintain focus on their sources of competitive advantage. Eg in the case of k8s, it's not just spinning it up, it's securing it, patching, monitoring, etc. It's for this reason the majority of orgs shouldn't run it themselves. However some balanc…

I agree that it makes more sense to buy your Kubernetes on an organizational basis because one should not reinvent the wheel, and taking advantage of a commoditized service is only possible if you work with a competent broker.

However I am wary of the capacity of skills vendors to take advantage when you come to depend on them, even when their intentions are good and all ideals aligned. Being able to deliver the limited Kubernetes experience for yourself in low-stakes contexts, where you can depend on it because you know how it works, well enough to administer in a pinch, but availing that also in a pinch you're not the bottleneck to solve a problem, because you use the managed broker in all the places where it matters, feels like a sweet spot to me.

I don't want to pay money to a broker every time I spin up a new experiment for the duration of the experiment =/= I don't want to perform experiments.

That's where I see the disconnect that "Leadership" may fail to understand. You can provide a service at low marginal cost to take some of the load off your people, and that might also have the effect of stopping any experiments that fall beneath a certain threshold as "not worth the cost" - all because we settled on getting something for cheap that should have been free.

Then again, dodging all those diversions might have been a part of the strategy...

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