291–300 of 354 posts
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> I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company $33m/year is only 33 fully loaded software developers including all overhead like HR and managers and office space, and also a cloud hosting bill. 33 really isn't that many.
I'd be surprised if the average package for SWE is $1M/year (fully loaded).
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You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll. A few other things: 1. Go-to-market costs Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, conte…
> but it may mean building new standards on top of the duct-taped 1980s-era networking stack the modern Internet still runs on. That’s a path directly into a money burning machine that goes nowhere. This has been tried so many times by far larger companies, academics, and research labs but it never works (see all proposals for things like content address networking, etc). You either get zero adoption or you just run…
I like Tailscale and we pay for it at work but it has a number of serious bugs that affect our work that they seem to lack the resources to fix. Hopefully this helps.
You are still trusting the tailscale coordination server for proper key exchange. Yes, traffic is end-to-end encrypted and the private keys stay on the device but there's no way to verify that tailscale is negotiating keys for the machine you asked for
The problem IIRC is that it is the coordination server that decides what is authorised, so if Tailscale was hacked (or otherwise malicious), nodes could get added to your tailnet without explicit authorisation from the tailnet "owner", which is obviously not good. To prevent this, they introduced tailnet-lock, which requires other peers to participate in node authentication: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock#how-it-works
I just wished their server side was open source also
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I understand the cynicism. But this is counter productive. Any venture has to have a finance angle. They are not missionaries.
Steam does fine financially and without having to answer investors, which is why it's been able to stay mostly good to its user base for so long. This is not an "xor" statement.