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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#81

Post by mooreds »

gangstead wrote: post #56
mad_vill wrote: post #13

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

> smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model. When you are running a consultancy you are in the business of marking up developer hours: find a client to sign a contract for $150 / hour and hire a cons…

> I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.

The only time I've seen this work (and I have seen it work multiple times) is with managed hosting.

So if you are an expert at developing web applications or solutions using you can offer a managed hosting solution to your clients where you host the web app or the solution. Not all of them will take you up on it, but some will. Those that do will pay you a monthly fee. This isn't free (you now have to carry a pager) but is recurring.

Building your own SaaS/other unrelated product? That's a rock I've seen several consulting ships crash into (to pick a metaphor). Here's one that some of my friends tried to build in the late 2000s that I wrote about: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/506

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#82

Post by mooreds »

ushakov wrote: post #4
tnolet wrote: post #3

I was following them on and off as they started around the same time I started a company in similar space and we shared an investor. Similarly, Armory.io also got sold in what seems a fire sale ($7M after raising $200M). Goes to show how hard this space is.

There’s no money in DevTools. Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

> There’s no money in DevTools.

MongoDB, Snyk and Auth0 might beg to differ. (I work for an Auth0 competitor.)

> Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

Isn't that true of any tool? How are devtools different (from a business perspective)?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#83

Post by propter_hoc »

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow.

At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees.

On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-...

In other words they somehow were running at a loss of about 1.5 million a month for three years until their runway "suddenly" ran out today.

According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed.

How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#84

Post by slgeorge »

lijok wrote: post #63

Pouring one out tonight. Weaveworks did some amazing work. Grafanalib has saved me months of work in the past.

Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#85

Post by Yasuraka »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #76
marcinzm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s. Not really, the space has simply grown faster than these companies could keep up with and were left behind. I can code up a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions in well under a week. With docker compose for local…

GitHub actions must have eaten most of the DevOps tooling market. It’s pretty good and it’s fine for the vast majority of pipelines.

GH Actions is just CI, maybe crude CD, and not the best at that.

It and (GitLab CI) ate Jenkins

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#86

Post by slgeorge »

mihaitodor wrote: post #9

Sometime last year, they had someone cold call me from the US to sell me stuff. I’m not sure where they got my number from, but I don’t think that’s a good strategy for trying to sell B2B solutions.

Sorry that annoyed you.

One thing to bear in mind is that at Weaveworks we made massive contributions and did our best to be part of the community in the right way:

* Flux * Flagger * Cortex * Ignite * Weave Net * and a whole host more

Oh and there's a load of people without jobs tonight - wondering about their futures - hopefully people will see the talent and the contributions and find roles for them.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#87

Post by aftbit »

slgeorge wrote: post #80

The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt. If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!

Just in time for cloud native to lose the spotlight in favor of on-prem and AI.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#89

Post by gk1 »

break_the_bank wrote: post #17

> The company was turning over double digit revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023. From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?

Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years.

I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#90

Post by pmig »

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else?

But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

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