451–460 of 469 posts
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Not sure why you're being downvoted. Most of the major IPOs of the last few years seem to follow that hump-into-oblivion pattern after public markets get in on it
I get down voted a lot. It's fine. People here don't like what I have to say. Little debate. Just down votes. I speak the true tho.
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The question is... right now, is it more like 1995 or 2001?
People said bitcoin was a bubble. Can't wait to see the excuses and rationalizations when this one pops.
>In April 2018, the Company executed an amendment to its existing agreement with Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). The amended agreement was effective as of May 1, 2018 and continues through July 31, 2023. The Company has minimum annual commitments of $50.0 million each year of the agreement term for a total minimum commitment of $250.0 million. As of January 31, 2019, the Company had a remaining minimum payment obligation of $212.5 million to AWS through July 31, 2023.
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Much of this goes into geo redundancy too. These 10M people are not in one place. So, you need redundant highly availably deployments in many regions. This does add lots of infrastructure duplication but is also super speedy for end users. This adds to the cost big time! For example, I was working with a gaming company and they had 10+ regions around the world, all using this type of setup, just to keep latency to an…
Hm, I may lack the proper knowledge. Why do I need redundant infrastructure? Why can’t I have instances in the cheapest region (300 ms delay is not going to kill anyone in a chat app), and if an instance fails, bring up a new instance, and if the region fails, bring up instances in another region. I don’t see why there should be redundant, idle instances running. Maybe duplicate the database / make it highly availabl…
It gains tens or hundreds of milliseconds, especially for channels/chats between people in the same region. You may not feel a "chat app" requires this level of performance, but the improvements there.
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Well, Zoom is already profitable and Slack could easily go profitable. But yes, the tale is different for AirBnB, Lyft, and Uber.
Airbnb is profitable. It has been since second half of 2016. Or at least close enough to profitable depending on the metrics you want to account for. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/airbnb-made-its-first-prof... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/airbnb-sa...
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You aren’t wrong. But keep in mind that these are all recurring revenue deals. The $400M is highly likely to recur next year or even increase - even if they don’t close a single additional customer. SaaS companies talk about “lifetime value” which is a fancy name for the net present value of future cash flow from each customer. What if today’s $400M will recur for ten years? That warrants a value of $4B just on today…
I can see them making money, I'm more shocked at the cost of running or building it up. I try to assume that if I think something is odd but it's not my field, I'm wrong and don't understand it properly. It's just at a scale I find hard to understand. A billion dollars is a lot . I'd love to know what it is they're pumping the money into that they make per user, because I can't see what massive upcoming things there…
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The thing I find curious is that businesses of this scale are still using cloud hosting. Is it cost-effective or otherwise better in some way to outsource your infrastructure instead of hiring an in-house IT team to manage your own hardware and connectivity at this level?
Generally, cloud is still better for many. Managing datacenters at scale is hard. It also takes time to build up capabilities in house, while cost of delay is usually far greater than cost efficiencies wrung out of infrastructure. Cloud is often a euphemism for “supported hosted software that happens to come with hardware”. Not that different from Dreamhost managing PHP for you , just richer and higher scale. Why bui…
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Thanks for the insight. Why build a cheaper internal capability over 6 months when I can have a slightly more expensive service NOW that I don’t have to worry about? If it really is just slightly more expensive, that seems like it would be a good investment for many businesses. I was just curious because this isn't a field I've been working in directly for a while. Last time I looked, but that was several years ago,…
In general, AWS/GCP/Azure hosting rates are only slightly marked up as compared to DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc. especially with reserved instances. These rates compare favourably to rolling your own DC (rack or more). It’s the bandwidth costs that are inflated by 500-1000%, which is where all the margins come from and it creates a lock in effect as getting your data out is expensive.
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The thing I find curious is that businesses of this scale are still using cloud hosting. Is it cost-effective or otherwise better in some way to outsource your infrastructure instead of hiring an in-house IT team to manage your own hardware and connectivity at this level?
My company recently dropped our in house data center and moved almost entirely to AWS. We had a few reasons; we just don't have the multiple data centers to gauruntee uptimes. Our product isnt data security so our limited staff can't keep the data as secure as AWS whose entire business is around security. And we just got to a point where it was cheaper to host on AWS than just to maintain our own data center. I hope…