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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#371

Post by lucasverra »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #319
raiyu wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet. We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you…

What's your biggest fear? Are you competing with Heroku free-tier or AWS?

serverless maybe ? easy UI in Cloud functions ?

I run all my JS / Front & back at glitch.com , with a another glicth.com app that awakes the others each 4 min

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#372

Post by nik736 »

seppin wrote: post #285
raiyu wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet. We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you…

> Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. Could you operate at a profit if you wanted to?

I guess the problem for DO is buying hardware, upfront costs for colocation (renting cages without actually using all of the available cabs/space), etc.. If they would stop buying hardware, which means no more growth and available resources, they would be super profitable.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#373

Post by anoncake »

jdhendrickson wrote: post #337
sillysaurusx wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. My issue was the timing. They turned off the server and deleted everything, including the backups, in a single day. In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.

The gall. I will never understand this mentality.

The point of backups is that they still exist after something went wrong. Something went wrong, the backups didn't exist, DO didn't do the job it was paid for.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#374

Post by MaxBarraclough »

anoncake wrote: post #373
jdhendrickson wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gall. I will never understand this mentality.

The point of backups is that they still exist after something went wrong. Something went wrong, the backups didn't exist, DO didn't do the job it was paid for.

DigitalOcean isn't obligated to store your data free of charge, which is what you're suggesting.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#375

Post by pier25 »

techsin101 wrote: post #338
pier25 wrote: post #260

Everyone knows DO for their VPS but their object storage prices are some of the lowest. $0.02 per GB stored $0.01 per GB transferred. That includes CDN too. I haven't found a better deal anywhere. Even Blackblaze doesn't offer CDN (AFAIK).

Could flare cdn vs digital ocean?

How much does Cloudflare CDN cost?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#376

Post by LordAtlas »

raiyu wrote: post #199
yowlingcat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the response! Are you at liberty to say a little more about the competing directions that, for lack of a better term, didn't win out? How will these changes impact customers, and could folks be left stranded in any way?

There is no impact to customers now or future. The changes were mostly internal in how teams were structured and was the result of leadership changes that happened. From the customer perspective we have never launched a product and then killed it. Anytime you are dealing with infrastructure and building services that other companies rely on for their business you have to be very sure that whatever you launch you plan…

>From the customer perspective we have never launched a product and then killed it

Can you please deliver a talk at Google some time?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#377

Post by RobAley »

robryan wrote: post #218
sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

How long to hold it for though? If say 90% of customers that haven’t paid for 5 weeks end up never paying that is resources they will never recover the cost for. What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.

You keep it until x days/weeks after the servers are deactivated. Where the emails are going unnoticed, the servers getting cut off usually is noticed straight away. The story here appears to be that the backups were deleted at the same time as the servers. For the relatively small cost of those who don't subsequently pay up, you get a lot of goodwill from the majority who just messed up.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#378

Post by raiyu »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #319
raiyu wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet. We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you…

What's your biggest fear? Are you competing with Heroku free-tier or AWS?

AWS was in the market before we ever got started, so unlike other startups we never had to worry about them entering our market and competing with us because we were actually entering their market.

What made us successful was focusing on a core set of customers, developers like ourselves, and they really appreciated what we built.

The only thing I worry about is ensuring that we continue to do that. The only constant in technology is that it will continue to evolve and change, and you have to make sure that you don't get distracted from your core mission. You certainly have to be aware of the competition and what they are doing, but you also have to figure out your path and who you are the "best" solution for, and continue to evolve that overtime.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#379

Post by Tassels »

RobAley wrote: post #377
robryan wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long to hold it for though? If say 90% of customers that haven’t paid for 5 weeks end up never paying that is resources they will never recover the cost for. What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.

You keep it until x days/weeks after the servers are deactivated. Where the emails are going unnoticed, the servers getting cut off usually is noticed straight away. The story here appears to be that the backups were deleted at the same time as the servers. For the relatively small cost of those who don't subsequently pay up, you get a lot of goodwill from the majority who just messed up.

When an account on DO is late with a payment, you go through three stages: hold, suspension, termination.

The hold happens right away and prevents you from creating new billable resources.

Then a suspension happens several weeks later, which powers off your servers.

You don’t get terminated until a couple weeks after that, at which point the data is irretrievable.

The time between each stage can vary depending on how long you’ve been a customer or what your monthly payments in the past have been, but that’s the gist of it.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#380

Post by raiyu »

HonestShark wrote: post #314
raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Moisey, big fan of yours, always have been. DO's board has been atrocious (not you and Ben). The way they handled bonuses even the years that we were growing 40+% because we missed #'s due to factors outside any employees control, was a joke. The hiring of Mark Templeton was one of the absolute worst things that could have happened, he damn near put DO on the brink of destruction. That said, it seems like Yancey is d…

You bring up a number of issues that we've went through as a company, but I think this is no different than many other companies that grow quickly and struggle through the complex process of getting alignment.

There is no company that gets everything right and I know that DigitalOcean hasn’t, and personally I haven’t gotten everything right myself. Certainly, I’ve made a ton of mistakes.

The real question is are we headed in the right direction now?

And you yourself have said that it looks like Yancey is right leader for DigitalOcean. And I would agree with that wholeheartedly.

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