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Tailscale has raised $160M

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#271

Post by guappa »

Carrok wrote: post #22
suralind wrote: post #18

Off-topic, but it makes me laugh that companies will list their “investors”, “advisors”, etc. on their company page, but not the people working there. That said, Tailscale is one of the products that just works.

As someone who currently has their photo on a company's 'About Us' page, I hate it. Why does anyone care who the nth developer is? Let me just do my job without forcing me to be publicly listed for spammers and scammers to target me.

Because it's so cool when I go "oh hey I know that guy!"

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#272

Post by PeterStuer »

Glass half full customer: great, the service I rely on is going to persist!

Glass half empty customer: OMFG, this is the minimal amount they are going to bleed from us over the next 5 years!

Based customer: this is just a half filled glass, full or empty is just your projection.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#273

Post by guappa »

dijit wrote: post #255
littlecranky67 wrote: post #246

Still can't wrap my head around that TS does not allow to signup with your custom email/password combination but forces you to use bigtech (GitHub, Apple, Meta etc.) to login. Running your custom OIDC provider as a small, private person does not make any sense either.

I think that's quite smart, and OIDC is an open standard at least. Securing usernames/passwords and handling second factors etc; is already done so well and it's hard to do. Having a clear 'this is where we can be secure' stances is what makes me want to trust them more.

It's an open standard, but would they allow me to use my OIDC?

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#274

Post by teleforce »

>Connecting GPUs across clouds, securing workloads across continents, migrating between cloud providers — it’s messy, it’s hard, and it breaks all the time.

Is the new fund raise to enable Tailscale perform these complex tasks or for scaling it?

I've once read few years back that seamless and secure cloud independent computing or cross-cloud system is the next frontier, and it seems it's a legit problem and a business opportunity for security company like Tailscale and Crowdstrike (investor). The record breaking acquisition of Wiz kind of cemented this problem space and the pain points, and it seems that Tailscale is riding on the opportunity [1].

[1]Google to buy Wiz for $32B (845 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#275

Post by lo0dot0 »

briHass wrote: post #192

I'm a fan of TS and have been a paying customer for work infra for almost a year now. It really is well put together and easy to use, but I do run up against some issues/complaints when diving deep that I hope they can work out: * The pricing tiers and included features by tier penalizes you in frustrating ways. The base plan is a reasonable $6/user/m, but if you want to use ACLs to control anything in a workable way…

> NAT/STUN world you were trying to avoid

The clean way to build this is with firewall configuration, opening ports, and static IPs. NAT/STUN and dynamic IPs are just a hack and I don't understand why people pretend this is an acceptable solution for professional networking. Working around an infrastructure that isn't a natural law but can be changed at our will seems like a big waste of time.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#276

Post by wkat4242 »

gizmo wrote: post #254
wkat4242 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh I work for an enterprise of tens of thousands of users and $18 a month is not nothing for us. In fact considering the discounts we get at our size that would be so high we'd never consider it. We don't even use windows enterprise for the same reason, we have legacy office 365 plans and lifetime windows licenses without the M365 addons because it saves is a few bucks per head. At our size, a few bucks a head quickl…

All too often it's those companies that worry excessively about saving a few dollars that also have meetings for everything, glacial decision making, poor strategic focus, tons of internal politics, and so on.

Some of that we have, yes. Glacial decision making definitely. Internal politics crap too. Meetings not so bad though (and especially flying all over the world for business meetings is heavily frowned upon since 2015 which is great because I always hated that)

Strategy is pretty good I think. And they are also not backing down on inclusivity and sustainability despite the threats from Trump (companies with inclusivity aren't allowed to do business with the US govt blahblah). We're an EU company but this worried me a bit (I'm heavily involved in the inclusivity program). But they've already said they are absolutely not giving in on that point.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#277

Post by lo0dot0 »

dijit wrote: post #255
littlecranky67 wrote: post #246

Still can't wrap my head around that TS does not allow to signup with your custom email/password combination but forces you to use bigtech (GitHub, Apple, Meta etc.) to login. Running your custom OIDC provider as a small, private person does not make any sense either.

I think that's quite smart, and OIDC is an open standard at least. Securing usernames/passwords and handling second factors etc; is already done so well and it's hard to do. Having a clear 'this is where we can be secure' stances is what makes me want to trust them more.

Why is that smart? I signed up for a Microsoft Account with my email and I can use Microsoft Account to log in to Tail scale but I can't use the email directly? How does the middle man bring anything to the table?

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#278

Post by wkat4242 »

lmeyerov wrote: post #269
wkat4242 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh I work for an enterprise of tens of thousands of users and $18 a month is not nothing for us. In fact considering the discounts we get at our size that would be so high we'd never consider it. We don't even use windows enterprise for the same reason, we have legacy office 365 plans and lifetime windows licenses without the M365 addons because it saves is a few bucks per head. At our size, a few bucks a head quickl…

Enterprise math is interesting -- For a global all-you-can-eat enterprise-wide rollout: * base: 20K users x $200/yr * 50% discount: volume + multi-year + ... => enterprise: $1M/yr => 200 person division in the enterprise: $10K/yr It's not cheap, but averaging out a global rollout, not terrible afaict (This is super rough. Ex: Add in BYO hardware, internal staffing, pro serv, and who knows the real discounting!)

Yeah no idea of the discounts there nor of how much we spend on our current VPN provider (I don't work in that team). I guess for a VPN they might have higher spending limits as a VPN is always required to be on on all of our endpoints.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#279

Post by supermatt »

lo0dot0 wrote: post #275
briHass wrote: post #192

I'm a fan of TS and have been a paying customer for work infra for almost a year now. It really is well put together and easy to use, but I do run up against some issues/complaints when diving deep that I hope they can work out: * The pricing tiers and included features by tier penalizes you in frustrating ways. The base plan is a reasonable $6/user/m, but if you want to use ACLs to control anything in a workable way…

> NAT/STUN world you were trying to avoid The clean way to build this is with firewall configuration, opening ports, and static IPs. NAT/STUN and dynamic IPs are just a hack and I don't understand why people pretend this is an acceptable solution for professional networking. Working around an infrastructure that isn't a natural law but can be changed at our will seems like a big waste of time.

> I don't understand why people pretend this is an acceptable solution for professional networking

Because it IS acceptable for many cases.

Many businesses don't operate in such a way as to have centralised infrastructure solely for providing internal networking, nor would they want to add the additional administrative or unnecessary routing overhead.

Even locations that would traditionally be considered highly centralised often have some form of dynamic network fabric as an overlay. Pretty much the entirety of cloud infrastructure runs on such systems, and they seem to do OK.

Re: Tailscale has raised $160M

#280

Post by pomatic »

groby_b wrote: post #180
api wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't raise VC money and save it for a rainy day. If VCs wanted their money in a bank they'd just put it in a bank. If you raise $100M you have to put $100M to work or you'll hear constant shit from your board over it. If they raised $160M they're going to spend $160M on something. My guess would be a lot of enterprise features and product integrations.

That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%." With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking) And if you read the Series C post, you'd know…

What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.
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