Yet another non-business grabbing $ from clueless investors. Surely there must be a word for the “we are grabbing $ from clueless investors” business model? WeWork is the poster child for that one.
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Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#32A case study of the pandemic speed of capital:
May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed
Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed
April 2021- $20.7M Series A
Dec 2021- $68M Series B
I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've got a feeling this has to be some kind of enterprise play. Random devs are not going to pay for a data format.
Their whole thing is tooling around protocol buffers, not the data format itself. The format is completely open source and comes from Google.
Protobuf is not even all that good as a format, flatbuffers has generally better properties.
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#34Lol. Imagine trying to capture a market that is already mostly happy with what it's got, and for free.
Imagine this offering: "Why go through the hassle of generating clients for your service for each language when we can build ergonomic clients automatically" and "Why manually look for breaking changes in your API when we can detect them manually" or "We can give you $AMAZING_FEATURE for free by using a clearer language to describe your api" where your feature could be:
1. Reduced bandwidth ingress 2. Automatic tracing of PII through your system 3. Developer-controlled ops stuff (annotating an RPC as cachable, etc) 4. Automated tracing instrumentation 5. Message streaming (gRPC streams are amazing)
I can think of a whole host of features that can be built off of protos (I've even built ORMs off of protobuffs for simple things [0]). The value prop is there IMO. HTTP + json APIs are a local minima. The biggest concerns "I want to be able to view the data that is being sent back and forth" is a tooling consideration (curl ... isn't showing you the voltages from the physical layer, it is decoded). Buff is building that tooling.
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#35Nice. so SOAP?
More like DCOM. What is old is new again!
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#36Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#37Hmm why do they need to raise so much cash every 9 months? Also does anyone here use them and have any thoughts about their product?
> Hmm why do they need to raise so much cash every 9 months? Well, they say the best time to take investment is when you don't need it. If you wait until you need it then the terms will be worse. If investors are offering you money when you don't need it, it may be the best time to accept it. The sequence of raises here look like a fairly normal sequence for a growing startup, except that they happened much closer to…
> FWIW, long ago I was the maintainer of Protobuf at Google, including putting together the first open source release. I like what buf is doing -- enough that, full disclosure, I made an angel investment in their seed round.
I know this might not be the best way to ask but have they considered creating proto rules for Bazel? The existing proto + gRPC story is pretty unfortunate.
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#38A case study of the pandemic speed of capital: May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed April 2021- $20.7M Series A Dec 2021- $68M Series B How can so many rounds be condensed so quickly for a business like this? Is the number of Homebrew downloads (37k as advertised on the home page) a metric that can lead to an 18 month ramp to Series B now? I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.
While the rest of the world is in a depression, Tech is in a bubble due to a ton of money being shifted over here since there was nowhere else to go.
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#39Raised that much at what valuation?
Re: Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
#40A case study of the pandemic speed of capital: May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed April 2021- $20.7M Series A Dec 2021- $68M Series B How can so many rounds be condensed so quickly for a business like this? Is the number of Homebrew downloads (37k as advertised on the home page) a metric that can lead to an 18 month ramp to Series B now? I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.
Maybe it's a lot more simple, like they have someone that's ridiculously good at raising venture capital, like the Posthog guys.