[HN Gopher] We raised a bunch of money
___________________________________________________________________
We raised a bunch of money
Author : charliermarsh
Score : 555 points
Date : 2023-06-28 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fly.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fly.io)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| so I'm guessing Vercel and Netlify deploy cloud functions only to
| the "least worst datacenter"?
|
| while Fly.io deploys compute instances to more regions and also
| has a database?
|
| asking because I've been content with Vercel and Netlify's CDN
| for frontend assets and simply stopped doing system design around
| relational storage, when I want to stay on a free tier.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're a full stack platform, most frequently compared to Heroku
| --- a place you'd run a Rails, Elixir, or Django app.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings?
|
| Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there
| are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and
| have changed their system design to accommodate the
| alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify?
| As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life
| support
| tptacek wrote:
| Vercel (for instance) does pure serverless --- you
| configure "functions" that are invoked by their
| orchestrator --- that are all Javascript, or compiled to
| JS/WASM.
|
| Fly.io takes Docker containers, turns them into VMs, and
| lets you decide where and when to have them running.
|
| One isn't better than the other; they're just totally
| different models for hosting applications. The Fly.io model
| is much closer to what Heroku did, just modernized (with
| Docker, edge deployments, the `fly-proxy`, etc).
| jondwillis wrote:
| No, with Vercel at least you can choose other "primary" data
| centers than northern Virginia. I haven't used Netlify for a
| few years so I can't speak to that.
| PKop wrote:
| More languages is the bigger difference... also not just cloud
| functions but full servers.
| dools wrote:
| Have you had a crack at making VoIP call quality better globally?
| It's one of those things you can't cache but I bet there are
| still some fancy things you can do to speed it up.
| MH15 wrote:
| Fly.io does VoIP calling?
| h_mirin wrote:
| I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku.
|
| I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single
| binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent
| sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system.
|
| Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are
| always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm
| getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels
| abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a
| continual set of asterisks.. but i'm probably being unfair and
| PTSD'y.
|
| Think i should give Fly a look? I at least find their SQLite
| features super interesting
| tennis_80 wrote:
| I'm not the person you're replying to but I'd say so.
|
| Under $5/month you pay nothing at the moment.
|
| https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/
|
| You need to look at the following for pricing:
|
| - Compute
|
| - Volumes (attached SSD, one per compute instance) -
| $0.15/GB/month.
|
| - Bandwidth - if you go over 160GB you have to pay per GB.
|
| Gut feel, ~$5/month should be fine for a small project as
| long as you're not storing loads of data or doing something
| that requires lots of bandwidth.
|
| If your project is used irregularly and HTTP based, you can
| also scale compute down to 0 machines. It'll boot up again
| when you get a HTTP request. In my experience it took ~3s or
| so to boot up a NestJS app on a small VM, totally acceptable
| for a dev environment.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Any idea if there are price caps? That's one thing i like
| about "dumb simple" machines is i'm paying for the machine,
| if it gets traffic and dies i still only pay $5/m. I'm not
| trying to build facebook, it's okay if it dies.
| mrkurt wrote:
| A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some
| months are better than others).
|
| Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each.
|
| Not too far off, depending on how much data you have.
| _However_ the platform has different tradeoffs than a single
| DigitalOcean VM. You 'll get better uptime percentages on a
| single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may
| not notice, but it's statistically true.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Does Fly handle price caps? Ie to setup pricing to
| replicate ~$5/m behavior. Helping to ensure i can't use up
| all my ~$5/m budget in a few days of traffic, but i also
| can't go over some specified cap.
|
| If so i'll probably give it a try!
|
| _edit_ : Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally
| set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and
| simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not
| having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i
| can keep pricing similar.
|
| Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always
| migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah.
|
| _edit2_ : Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though
| i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking
| about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit _and_ a
| subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month.
|
| Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else
| exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money.
|
| [1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-
| per-mon...
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I ran fly for a six months and it went from free to $10/mo
| and I still don't know why.
|
| I'd say if static pricing is important to you stick with DO.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Some variation is okay, but boy do i need pricing caps. I
| might give it a try just for security (not managing the
| OS), but if there's no caps.. oof.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I'm unaware if there's caps, the pricing just seemed
| opaque to me due to poor monitoring tools.
|
| Security wise, Ubuntu LTS with unattended upgrades and
| livepatch is likely better than 99% of public facing
| servers.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Huh, i'll have to look into that. I'm not aware of
| unattended upgrades. Though i still value not risking a
| messed up config leaking data by way of ssh access, or
| something.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This is the biggest draw for me. I don't have a need for Fly at
| the moment, like I have not needed Heroku most of the time, but
| its got strong mindshare for me. Heroku was basically great,
| and apart from not quite keeping up with modern practices and
| having recent outages, it's still otherwise a great UX. Fly
| feels like that but updated for the modern age.
| gizmo wrote:
| Okay so they raised 100m which means they need to work towards a
| 1bn exit. And if they want to keep their momentum going their r&d
| cost will go through the roof. Because they have to build the
| whole stack and it all has to be rock solid (eventually). It's an
| immense engineering effort.
|
| I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for
| compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real
| expense is r&d, marketing and SBC and those will rule out
| profitability at any scale. These are not one-time expenses. You
| have to keep spending forever or your customers will leave. We've
| seen this time and time again. Heroku isn't the only example.
| It's the tragedy of platform/infra startups.
| dadrian wrote:
| That's backwards. Profitability at scale is about the _only_
| way for a cloud provider to be profitable. There's a reason you
| don't see a bunch of small cloud providers, the economics only
| work at scale.
| gizmo wrote:
| Platform companies can't scale by just getting more of the
| type of customers they already have. They scale by getting
| bigger and more demanding customers. Those customers will
| expect the things AWS and the other big cloud platforms
| already offer. And then R&D expenses explode. The bigger they
| get the higher R&D will be. In absolute numbers and relative
| to revenue.
|
| Yes, it's true that if you become as big as AWS then economy
| of scale starts to work in your favor again. But that outcome
| is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. The realistic
| best case outcome is that they become a mid-sized cloud
| provider, like Digital Ocean. And Digital Ocean, in business
| for 11 years and having raised 500m (pre IPO) is still losing
| money. Linode, after 20 years of struggle, ultimately gave up
| and sold for $900m last year. Even the best case outcome
| looks pretty bleak.
| nik736 wrote:
| Linode "gave up" with a 900M exit? How is that negative.
| esafak wrote:
| That's not even a billion dollars! If you round down,
| it's zero billion!
| stephen wrote:
| I really like their acknowledgement that they expected to be used
| for game/edge caching/etc, but in reality everyone is using them
| as a new Heroku to deploy Rails+PG crud apps.
|
| Afaiu they're asserting their next goal is to make edge-ify-ing
| Rails+PG apps trivial / a "two hour problem".
|
| That's pretty bold...historically that's required very
| app/framework/domain-specific concerns/coupling around "what's
| the best way (if possible) to shard this domain model", and
| solving it as PaaS/IaaS basically means writing/running a
| distributed CloudSQL / Aurora.
|
| Which I guess if it's "just" running an Aurora clone/neon
| seamlessly in their stack, that seems doable/achievable + very
| worthwhile as a value-add/product.
| GGO wrote:
| Fly.io might be an underdog now, but they will come out on top in
| 5~6 years when most of the small to medium size businesses will
| be running on it.
| hinkley wrote:
| In 3-4 years they will announce a merger.
| turbobooster wrote:
| [dead]
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you're
| increasing API user fees once you've monopolized your particular
| market? Or how about how you'll be increasing margins for
| investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO?
|
| Why won't you suffer the fate of every single other tech company
| that raises a shit load of money which is completely and
| irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for
| customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
|
| My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises
| venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by
| raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an
| adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your
| investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the
| long term is worse off.
|
| Edit: I've been a HN power user since 2012 - don't ask me why I'm
| here.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Cloudflare is going for market share in the cloud.
|
| Pretty safe bet that they'll stay cheap for a long time because
| of that.
|
| Because outside of tech innovation, cost is still a mayor
| selling point.
| samtho wrote:
| Further, it seems like these highly integrated "app platforms
| as a service" have been the primary type of dev tool that VCs
| are drawn too given the complete vendor lock in they
| provide/demand. It worked for squarespace, wix, Shopify, et al.
| Vercel has a softer sell on this, and firebase was one of the
| first to offer a fully managed database in this space.
|
| My hot take is that these platforms are relying on an influx of
| new developers who need a friction free way to build and deploy
| applications to learn and showcase while selling to companies
| that don't have time or budget to create a full dev team and
| CI/CD environment, creating both sides of supply and demand.
| Pricing is engineered in a way such that it gets very expensive
| the moment before companies notice how much cost it incurs but
| the cost to switch aways is much higher.
|
| I agree with the heuristic of avoiding VC-backed products, it
| fosters incentives that often leave otherwise loyal customers
| holding the bag for a product who price does not match the
| service provided. It is for this reason I consider high vendor-
| lock-in products rather insidious.
| kunalgupta wrote:
| So like which products do you use, then?
| cj wrote:
| A lot of companies are bootstrapped or "seed-strapped".
|
| My company raised a $1.2m seed after doing a startup
| accelerator in 2015, used it to get to profitability, and
| we've been growing 40% YoY for a very long time without any
| additional outside capital.
|
| It's also a huge selling point to prospective employees while
| interviewing candidates: "Unlike many other startups, we
| haven't raised lots of money, we're profitable, we've never
| done lay offs. That's all possible because we have product
| market fit and we have a sustainable business model. Our
| customers (rather than VCs) fund our growth."
|
| Personally, I really like the "seed strapped" model... raise
| 1-2 million in order to find PMF and begin an early
| sales/marketing function with the goal of reaching
| profitability before the $1-2 million is burned through. It
| also creates a short window to fail fast... lots of companies
| raised way too much money and will end up failing very
| slowly.
|
| "Failing very slowly" is what should be avoided.
|
| Raising huge amounts of VC is a signal the company couldn't
| sustain their growth with their current revenue and operating
| model. It's also a signal that the company is likely using
| inorganic / unscalable tactics to grow, which might work now
| but won't work forever. That means the company will likely
| pivot their model at some point (from an employee
| perspective, that means higher risk of lay offs, and from a
| customer perspective, that means higher risk of price hikes
| in the future, etc)
| coder9874 wrote:
| This is an entirely valid model, and many startups would be
| better served by following it. Still, the whole point of
| (larger) VC funding rounds is facilitate rapid growth, far
| more than 40% year over year. There's no contradiction
| between embracing bootstrapping/seedstrapping where it
| works, and VC funding for the cases with hyper-growth
| potential.
| tedmiston wrote:
| > Why won't you suffer the fate of every single other tech
| company that raises a shit load of money which is completely
| and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial
| for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long
| term?
|
| To be fair, the _fate_ of most of them is actually to fail.
| Hence this amplified effect of _why_ VCs need such a standout
| massive return to make the fund model work.
|
| That said, while it seems like it to us normal folk, in the
| grand scheme of VC, $25M is not really "a bunch of money". In
| 2021, a16z led or co-lead $3.2B [1] in funding rounds. I can't
| find a publicly available stat for how many rounds that
| entailed, but napkin math says 100-300. Of course the
| distribution is not linear, but if we take the 200 investments
| midpoint, that's a $16M check on average.
|
| The additional $70M here follow-on is the real story. It looks
| like they are not giving it a label, though Crunchbase lists
| the $25M from a16z a year ago as Series B, so I'm inclined to
| call this new round the Series C.
|
| > My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that
| raises venture funding.
|
| IMO tech, startups at least, are not long-minded like this in
| general. Companies regularly come and go in 6-24 months. Good
| luck convincing the current and next waves of CTOs of not using
| venture-backed tech [that saves them tons of time for great
| prices right now]. And then portcos also often make deals with
| other portcos... the cycle feeds itslef in more ways than one.
|
| It's like trying to change the color of the ocean with one
| single cup of red dye. At the end of the day, this is just a
| rounding error.
|
| But also, Big Tech will end up acquiring many of the standouts
| a la Firebase or Heroku. Resisting the model won't upend or
| stop it.
|
| [1]: https://news.crunchbase.com/liquidity/under-the-hood-a-
| decad...
| rco8786 wrote:
| > My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that
| raises venture funding.
|
| What about posting on a forum owned and operated by a venture
| firm?
|
| Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed
| tech firms is endless.
|
| I don't even disagree with the general sentiment...but your
| resolution seems particularly short-sighted.
| tjoff wrote:
| > _Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture
| backed tech firms is endless._
|
| Not a convincing list of companies there...
| rco8786 wrote:
| I chose those because they are ubiquitous and downright
| _hard_ to avoid. What do you want to bet OP made that post
| on a Chrome browser? Or an Android /iPhone/Macbook? Is
| there even a way to purchase a computer of any sort that
| doesn't involve supporting a venture backed company? The
| list of venture backed companies is so long, it would be
| exhaustive if not impossible to avoid using them without
| going off grid.
|
| How many venture backed companies do you think are involved
| just in me pressing the "reply" button to send this post?
| tjoff wrote:
| Sure, but that just reinforces the idea to not support
| them in the beginning?
| tlogan wrote:
| It is true but that is life.
|
| Consider this perspective: Users of Fly.io are essentially
| getting a loan from venture capitalists. However, just like any
| loan, it has to be repaid eventually. Thus, it's prudent not to
| take on an excessively large commitment.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| I think It's actually quite a beneficial pattern for the likes
| of the consumer and the founders.
|
| Say Fly will eventually get acquired or IPO, their founders
| will justify it that they could use that money to work on Fly's
| mission statement or if they've had their fill of servers go on
| to build further startups in Fusion, AI, or Space Technologies
| or even give to charity (take your pick).
|
| When they do get acquired/IPO the natural bureaucracy of large
| organisations and shift in incentives will set in (we've been
| here before with Heroku/Salesforce and SendGrid/Twilio...) and
| they'll become slow, more risk-averse, and ultimately less
| innovative catering for enterprise and other large businesses
| (where the easy corporate money is at) instead of scrappy
| startups and curious hackers.
|
| This is where Fly 2.0 comes in 5 years down the line reaching
| No. 1 on Hacker New, where utilising the latest technology
| they'll create a completely new and innovative solution that
| will solve the current problem even better than now and they'll
| start by catering for startups and hackers until they
| themselves get acquired/IPO.
|
| This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing - founders get a
| chance to cash out, consumers get cycles of new innovation.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Except when you get something like YouTube or the American
| telcos that have a monopoly/oligopoly and suck all potential
| for competition out of the space.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Thank you, you've made my point beautifully for me
|
| Founders and Investors get rich and repeat the whole thing!
|
| Yes tell me how beneficial "cycles of innovation" are to the
| average person who increasingly can't afford rent or food
| because _checks notes_ every company is doing this cycle so
| nobody is getting paid except founders and investors and are
| increasing profits to a degree that would make usury blush.
|
| So what is the solution!? You too should become a founder and
| investor so that you aren't getting screwed over anymore! Aka
| if you can't beat 'em join em ---that old ethical chestnut.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I'm not against this, by that point there will be another
| hosting provider with even cooler features for small companies
| to make their next startup in.
|
| Fly.io are doing great I think and that they might one day
| charge more I'm not that upset by it at all. If fly.io can make
| money at a higher price that means they are adding more value.
|
| I hasten to add you appear to be hanging out on a forum focused
| on VC funded startups.
| mrkurt wrote:
| The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for
| (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to
| improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for
| this stuff and we don't have pricing power.
|
| I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without
| raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping
| back in time 25 years and starting then.
| xNeil wrote:
| Yeah no I have to agree with you on this one. Every company
| is going to raise prices at one point or another - it might
| be inflation, it might be profit-chasing, padding for an IPO
| - whatever.
|
| Just because a startup _might_ raise prices in the future
| shouldn 't stop you from using their products - with a
| caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator.
| I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that
| - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider _just
| in case_?
| danenania wrote:
| I can't speak to other features, but if you just want to
| run docker containers in the cloud, fly is about as close
| to zero lock-in as it gets.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud
| without raising money
|
| Only if your condition is that you want to do it in the next
| 3 years.
|
| Given 15, I imagine quite a lot is possible.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I am skeptical that Hetzner or OVH or similar could get off
| the ground starting in 2023.
|
| There are a couple of things working against a boostrapped
| public cloud:
|
| First, you gotta buy expensive kit. And then hope you can
| make your money back over the next 18 months.
|
| Funding this is hard. You could try to borrow money, but
| that (a) increases your underlying cost and (b) dictates
| how you sell. You can't borrow money against developer
| usage / traction because banks don't know how to value
| that. So you have to do top down sales and land some big,
| committed customers before you can use debt.
|
| The sales model constrains the product. There is no big,
| committed customer on the planet that will buy global
| infrastructure from a company who hasn't built it out yet.
| So you won't be building a global cloud, you'll end up in
| one region.
|
| And, no big committed customer is going to buy something
| novel. They do not care that "fly launch" makes it easy for
| a dev to launch a new project. They care that they got the
| best possible pricing when they were shopping for their
| hardware. They might care that they can run k8s on it.
|
| This is all fine, though. I'm not opposed to it. But I
| think it leaves you with something that's not as good as
| AWS, even though it's cheaper.
| [deleted]
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Sure. And in 15 years you'll have something that might have
| been relevant 15 years ago.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Are you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for
| your existing customers?
|
| Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience?
|
| Or do you lock in customers?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to. You
| can buy 'em from a million different places.
|
| It's pretty easy to move off, though. `fly launch`
| generates a Dockerfile you can run pretty much anywhere.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Exactly what went through my head when reading
|
| > There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny
| Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io
| that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures
|
| There's the _other_ kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led
| by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over
| their customers at a later date.
| EGreg wrote:
| Welcome to shareholder capitalism, extracting rents from all
| sides of the market perpetually to enrich shareholders. This
| is why utility tokens were such a big game changer for me.
|
| Consider the economics of decentralized utility tokens vs
| this shareholder capitalism. The former can help developers
| make a profit ONCE on the PRIMARY sales, at a predictable
| rate, and mostly turn the network over to the participants to
| transact and control. The protocol can stay open and the
| company no longer has any power to increase rents or piss
| everyone off by spying on everyone or subverting democracy.
| So compare, say, Ethereum or IPFS vs something like Twitter
| or Facebook which are controlled by a small group of people
| like Elon or Zuck. (My money's on Zuck for the fight btw.)
|
| Let's explore how Facebook got to where it is. Remember Zuck
| was an open source bro who turned down M$ for $1M and ended
| up open sourcing Synapse. He built Wirehog, as a
| decentralized file sharing network.
|
| I was attending TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in NYC and personally
| heard Sean Parker speak proudly about how they "put a bullet
| in that thing" -- because it threatened corporate profits and
| rent extraction.
|
| Sean Parker learned not to mess with corporate profits, when
| his company Napster got sued into oblivion by the other "lock
| up the IP monopoly" industries -- music and movies. MPAA and
| RIAA. So he started Plaxo and learned to be VC.
|
| Then he brought Peter Thiel, the guy who seriously advocates
| "competition is for losers, build a monopoly". He gave Mark a
| lot of good advice and the VC industry turned him from an
| open source bro into a corporate golden boy who buys up the
| competition, the founders of which leave in disgust after
| their golden handcuffs are off (WhatApp, Oculus, and yes
| Instagram). This isn't an isolated story. Elon owns Twitter.
| Bezos owns Amazon. The nicer guys like Ohanian and Jack got
| out, after selling, though. And they all want
| decentralization now.
|
| Moxie left WhatsApp and started an end-to-end encrypted
| messenger (Signal). Out of all the former founders (Tim
| Berners-Lee, Brendan Eich, Jack Dorsey, etc) Moxie may be the
| only one who is skeptical of decentralized architectures, and
| mostly because he thinks it is too slow to innovate. But even
| Moxie -- if you remember - was going to fund WhatsApp
| honestly through $1 a year fees, until he and Jan Koum "sold
| out" for a $19 Billion payday. I don't blame them... but
| there is a reason WhatsApp became this:
|
| https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/25-perce.
| ..
|
| Whatever the failings of Web3 smart contracts may be, the
| shareholder capitalism driving Web2 has predictably led to
| the same outcome -- the platforns that all of us come to
| depend on are controlled by a few people and we never know
| what they will do.
|
| Reddit? Got sold and shittified recently.
|
| FogBugz? Same.
|
| It goes on and on. The reason the parent and grandparent
| comment are the way they are is because we _see_ this over
| and over. But realizing the consequences of funding projects
| in this way, what is the alternative? Utility tokens. They
| are easy to create, to crowdfund (do it legally through a
| broker-dealer like Rialto Markets), and now this year there
| is a legal precedent for secondary sales once you have the
| network up and running: http://blockchain.news/news/baf7670d-
| 74ad-4c8f-aed6-c95afdc0...
|
| We don't _need_ the old boys network anymore!
|
| People on HN say that Web3 has no use cases. This is just one
| of many. It's easy to do, anyone here can use it to crowdfund
| their own project with people around the world, who become
| stakeholders, and guarantee to your users that you won't have
| the same pitfalls the GO described. Funding platforms in this
| way solves many problems.
|
| EDIT: To the various people who see the word "Web3" and
| downvote just based on that... go ahead! Downvote but make an
| argument! Say something. You're always so silent when it
| comes to substantive reasons, yet so opinionated with the
| downvote. What happened to intellectually honest debate? I
| would be _happy_ to hear constructive counterpoints.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I think you could just say: "Instead of relying on the
| concentrated capital of VC firms, we should rely more on
| individuals investing smaller amounts in companies they
| want to use. The individuals collective stake in the
| company can help protect them from the company going
| against their interests."
|
| That's just the main point right? Everything becomes
| essentially Kickstarter/Patreon subscriptions, and maybe
| you pay a little more fees to exchange your money to
| tokens?
|
| Its surely an appropriate argument to make I guess, just
| falls a little flat to me personally. Like I just want to
| use a service and not get ripped off, I don't want to enter
| into and have stake in some distinct governance structure
| for every service I want use.
| EGreg wrote:
| Well yes, and now you can do it using open protocols,
| without relying on centralized platforms for the money
| part.
|
| Utility tokens need a decentralized network so there is
| no single point of failure. Just like the Web itself
| (1.0) disrupted gatekeepers at newspapers, TV and Radio
| stations, etc. that you used to have to pay ("payola") to
| get the word out. VOIP lowered the cost of long distance
| phonecalls to pretty much zero by eliminating middlemen,
| too. The infrastructure providers shouldn't ALSO control
| your app layer, that's the point!
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It just all seems irrelevant to fly.io. I can host stuff on
| there for money, which is all I want from a service
| provider. Electricity and storage and network and compute
| and infrastructure engineers cost money, and I'm happy to
| give them money. How does web3 get these things paid for?
| EGreg wrote:
| It's not irrelevant to the parent and grandparent
| comment, which (having experienced the recent buyouts at
| Reddit and others) are rightly wary of a similar outcome,
| and regard _the mere fact of being funded by VCs_ as a
| ticking time bomb. So what is the alternative?
|
| Don't build your app on someone else's platform. Whether
| it's Twitter and Periscope, or Apple vs mamy developers (
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-
| app...) ... build on a permissionless platform that isn't
| owned by any gatekeepers. Like the Web. Or Ethereum. Or
| Polygon.
|
| Utility tokens and micropayments via trustlines are
| exactly done for that purpose.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm only talking about the parent comment in my reply.
|
| But okay, I'll bite. How is fly.io not the Web?
| EGreg wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. It seems like a strawman question
| of some kind.
|
| Well, fly.io is not the Web, but also it's not the point
|
| The closest I can get to what your questions is to say,
| it's under the control of a for-profit company financing
| itself with shareholders who want to see profits? That's
| true of many companies, the sentiment in the GP comments
| applies to the general pattern of becoming enshittified
| after a large investment / sale, not specifically fly.io
| nwienert wrote:
| Great points. Don't fret the downvotes. It's cooler to be
| proven right in the face of popular doubt.
| pc86 wrote:
| Why is it that any time VC financing comes up in any
| fashion we end up with some unrelated pseudo-meme
| walloftext nonsense bouncing back and forth between a
| treatise on the structural inefficiencies of capitalism and
| tech fundraising from 30 years ago? All with some tenuous
| barely coherent tie back to blockchain, or NFTs, or web3,
| or whatever The Next Bitcoin(tm) du jour is.
| EGreg wrote:
| Because open source software is the only alternative we
| know to the problem that was described, that has
| consistently liberated people everywhere it was
| introduced. And utility tokens are a great way that was
| invented several years ago to monetize open source and
| turn it into a free market instead of only a gift
| economy.
|
| Blockchain is the most widespread and proven way thus far
| to eliminate the middleman, and it's there right now, you
| can deploy a token in a few minutes if you wanted. Many
| people here seem to keep repeating the mantra that "Web3
| has no good applications" but here is one that _literally
| solves the societal problem you are complaining about_
| and has done so with IPFS, Ethereum, Polygon and many
| other permissionless networks.
|
| It's a wall of text because there are literally so many
| detailed examples, that I chose to engage in a few. I
| like to back up what I'm saying so people don't think I'm
| just talking out of my ass. Now the ball is in your court
| to explain why you disagree anyway.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't even know that I do disagree with you. I just
| don't think Venture Capital is some sort of existential
| threat, or by definition a problem (some specific
| applications of it, sure), so I don't think the
| blockchain solves any real problem out of the box. It's
| an interesting thing from a technical standpoint, and
| some interesting things have been built on top of it, and
| I made some money on BTC back before it was 5 figures.
|
| But you're not going to convince anyone to swap out VC
| funding for _utility tokens_ by talking about Napster and
| FogBugz.
| tptacek wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a really short and boring blog post?
| civilitty wrote:
| I assume their writers can expand it beyond "We're going to
| fuck you over, but thanks for all the fish!" Make it sound
| all smart and snarky and stuff.
| tptacek wrote:
| Well, now I can't use that title for the post. Thanks a
| lot.
| dctoedt wrote:
| You really ought to do some standup comedy, Thomas (do
| you?); I regularly LOL at some of your comments -- even
| the subtle put-downs, like the parent -- and yet you're
| invariably courteous and non-snarky.
| tptacek wrote:
| You are the first person on this site I've ever heard
| describe me as non-snarky. :)
| dctoedt wrote:
| Maybe my line of work has altered my frame of reference
| ....
| nologic01 wrote:
| other things being equal, organic growth via paying customers
| is the time-honored way of avoiding the pathologies you
| mention.
|
| in this model speculative capital is only required in the very
| early stages. a company either reaches a symbiotic relation
| with its clients or not. the burden is primarily on intrinsic
| aspects of what the startup venture delivers and how much this
| resonates in its sector.
|
| the VC model is basically turbo-charging this process. though
| it is risk capital and not lending, it creates an implicit,
| arbitrarily sized liability that need not have much to do with
| the underlying value proposition. it removes the organic
| cashlow constraint via a faustian bargain.
|
| the "beauty" of it is that you can't have both models in the
| same economy. the set of ideas that are ripe for exploration at
| an given era are what they are. if some people pursue them
| while being on steroids this means there is no room for people
| to explore them in a less toxic way
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Extremely well said and highlights exactly the problem and
| why you can't just passively accept this state of affairs.
|
| Capitalism literally crowds out alternative forms of
| organization in favor for monopolizing a market in order to
| rent seek. This is the explicit path set by guys like Peter
| Thiel and is neither passive nor has compunction.
|
| Don't forget that regulatory capture is part of the game too
| - such that you can legally embed your philosophy in such a
| way that makes crowding out the defacto approach.
| [deleted]
| coder9874 wrote:
| Good luck avoiding every single venture-funded company. Can you
| give an example of such a "monopoly"? Vercel? They have plenty
| of competitors, all they are doing is charging a premium for
| convenience. There will always be alternatives to any given
| tool if you don't like the costs. Seems your problem is with
| capitalism and not this particular startup.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > Seems your problem is with capitalism and not this
| particular startup.
|
| Correct. It just is the case that one (the company and it's
| philosophy) is a symptom of the other (nightmare unchecked
| capitalism).
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >once you've monopolized your particular market?
|
| How can you monopolize this market? There is no moat here at
| all. There are already trillion dollar companies competing
| here. They are selling a commodity.
| gotmedium wrote:
| If that is the case, then you shouldn't be using Apple, Google,
| Intel, Nvidia, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Git, etc etc.
|
| Companies raise money now to generate cash flows in the future
| from a wildly risky innovation. Assuming the thesis is correct,
| the company will then to pay it back to investors (VCs and
| their investors including Endowment Funds), but also employee
| and taxes.
|
| As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let
| government spend in things like education, infrastructure,
| social security.
|
| It's either this or socialism.
|
| "Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the
| others"
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let
| government spend in things like education, infrastructure,
| social security.
|
| As companies grow so does their ability to dodge taxes.
| That's why they're headquartered in Ireland, Bermuda or
| whatever the latest low corporate tax state is.
| Proportionally they're likely paying less than a corner
| store. I certainly pay more in income tax.
| donmcronald wrote:
| How does Git fit with the rest of those?
| xeromal wrote:
| I assume they mean GitHub
| sfitz wrote:
| speculating they mean source control providers like github,
| gitlab, bitbucket, and not actually 'git'
| [deleted]
| malta_kano wrote:
| [flagged]
| renewiltord wrote:
| I don't understand why someone comes to a startup incubator and
| VC forum when they hate venture funded startups. You know what
| YC does, right?
|
| There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically
| select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise?
| Why? It's just baffling behavior.
| fnimick wrote:
| It may be a VC forum, but it functions as a broad technical
| forum. How many posts here are explicitly about startup
| economics?
|
| It's important to remind people in the broader technical
| community that financial success should not the only goal,
| nor should it be required to maximize profit at the expense
| of customers.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Fair enough. It's not you, it's me. I'll just not interact
| with these comments in future. I have a mechanism to fix
| this.
| Electricniko wrote:
| Not OP, but I think the answer is that a lot of people who
| quit Reddit a couple weeks ago have spread out to other
| news/discussion forums to find something to replace it.
| They're still in the exploration phase trying to find
| communities that resemble subreddits they used. The content
| on this forum sort of resembles a few tech related
| subreddits, even if the discussions and intent are quite
| different.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I suppose the community makes the purpose of the community.
| And this sort of thing makes me worse, so I should seek
| something else, or modify my interaction with this
| community.
|
| It's an open forum and presumably those running it prefer
| this outcome.
|
| Fair enough.
| [deleted]
| Solvency wrote:
| This is the cold truth. The entire process of raising money in
| the modern software world has nothing to do with creating a
| better product and business specifically. It's simply the de
| facto step-by-step playbook process one follows if one is an
| entrepreneur with the eventual become very rich. There is
| nothing novel, innovative, or remotely surprising about this
| process. It is well defined, well established, and simply how
| business is done. Every single person looking to build a
| company for the purposes of becoming rich should adhere
| religiously to this playbook. It's a cold, hard, transactional
| fact of life. Whether or not the product is good and fair and
| honest is largely an independent variable to this basic
| playbook process.
| esteth wrote:
| Sometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to
| sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you
| want to do.
|
| If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a
| customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then
| it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 _now_ to make
| 90$ over some period of time.
| akiselev wrote:
| That's what's so great about five year projections! Somehow
| it's always _worth it_ until reality comes knocking after
| the money's been raised. Then it's a mad scramble for ROI
| that debases everything that built the business.
| Solvency wrote:
| There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model
| that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of
| incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D. It's
| trivial to imagine how a responsible incremental funding
| approach could create a better, more transparent, more
| estimable, more reportable, more mappable, more rigorously
| trackable innovation process.
|
| Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION. You
| have been led to believe this is the only way to go about
| building a software business like this.
|
| It's all a major silkscreen for the colder simpler goal of
| generating a lot of eventual wealth for a specific cast of
| people.
|
| Again, no shame or emotion here. It's just how business is
| done in this world.
| nradov wrote:
| That alternative only works in the absence of competitors
| who raise capital to pursue more rapid growth. It is an
| arms race to an extent, but if you don't play the game
| then you may get locked out.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Particularly when that rapid growth involves price
| dumping. I've bootstrapped businesses before. It's really
| difficult to compete with free offerings when you have to
| pay the bills. Your competitors can burn a pile of cash
| to flush out the competition. They don't even need a
| better product... people love getting stuff for free.
| Invariably, those services either go bust or don't remain
| free since it's often unsustainable. But, it means in the
| short-term you often need to raise money if you're
| competing with a VC-backed business.
| tedmiston wrote:
| > There is an entirely possible and alternative funding
| model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of
| incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D.
|
| You are completely missing the point of venture capital
| here.
|
| Of course, bootstrapping exists, but I can't point to any
| similar companies to Fly which have achieved standout
| success in an area like this with a model like that.
|
| > Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION.
|
| Valuation is merely a side effect in pursuit of market
| dominance or hopefully establishing a niche monopoly.
| munificent wrote:
| _> There is an entirely possible and alternative funding
| model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of
| incremental funds for the purposes of novel R &D._
|
| This works for some but not all business ventures.
|
| There's a reason corporations were invented in the Age of
| Sail. If you build 5% of a ship, you can't sail to the
| New World and bring back 5% of the resources. You just
| sink in the harbor.
|
| (The moral implications of relating modern VC-invested
| corporations to rapacious European conquests of the
| already-inhabited-thank-you-very-much New World is not
| lost on me.)
|
| I believe there are healthy ways to start up a business
| that has startup costs too large to bootstrap. I agree
| with you that VCs are often not it.
| [deleted]
| ZiiS wrote:
| You can build a small ship and a track record of
| profitable trade with the next port, then the next
| country over before undertaking an ocean crossing.
| tonymillion wrote:
| And by the time you've done that 97.3% of all shipping
| from the new world is being handled by a small handful of
| companies with gigantic cargo ships.
|
| But congratulations, you've successfully created a small
| "local" business with a decent number of customers who
| are reasonably loyal. You should be happy with what you
| have and possibly invest in future generations who want
| to colonize the moon or something (assuming you want to
| expand your wealth)
| munificent wrote:
| But you can't incrementally upgrade that ship to become a
| large ship.
|
| At some point, you need the capital investment to build a
| big ship, and the return on that investment is zero
| unless you build the whole ship.
| mordae wrote:
| Or maybe 20 customers who believe that having a shared
| ship might form a join stock company to take care of
| their respective 5%... and when the venture proves
| itself, they might convert it to a publicly traded
| company and let it scale up with demand.
| tonymillion wrote:
| that's literally an angel investor financed startup
| munificent wrote:
| _> Or maybe 20 customers who believe that having a shared
| ship_
|
| You might describe these people as "capitalizing a
| venture", in fact, or "venture capitalists".
| [deleted]
| dmix wrote:
| I'm curious have you ever tried to raise money for a tech
| business before?
|
| There's a big reason VC and angels were and largely
| continue to be only game in town. No one understands or
| would risk loaning millions of dollars on a high risk
| business aiming for marginal incremental growth.
| superq wrote:
| > marginal incremental growth
|
| VC's and angels wouldn't be interested in that, either.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Real world example: was DropBox a better or worse product
| when they were a simple syncing app before they started
| "innovating".
|
| The only consumer company that I can think of that went
| from "initial value proposition" to "not sucking after it
| went public" is BackBlaze. None of their new offerings
| has taken away from their initial "unlimited cheap
| backup" offering.
| dadrian wrote:
| You raise money to pay for costs of running the business. If
| you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already
| extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size,
| let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in
| multiple regions. Good luck getting even four regions for
| less than $1M. The world would be far worse off if all tech
| businesses had to be bootstrapped.
|
| That being said, there's certainly many businesses that
| raised too much money based on bullshit, had the founders
| take money off the top, and then have to drastically change
| to become sustainable, especially in the ZIRP era. But I
| don't see that happening here.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just buy an ASIN and use a VPS provider than understands
| them. You are now multihomed.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| To add to it, without external funding _any_ innovation
| would be stifled by existing players. If you can't even get
| low millions in funding, existing corporations with tens of
| billions of free money will eat you alive.
|
| Organically growing a business; bootstrapping sounds fine,
| until you try to do something that potentially has any
| global impact.
| heipei wrote:
| It's funny to hear this in this context. Fly is treated
| as one of the few potential successors to Heroku, and
| Heroku raised very little money while remaining the
| number one choice for most devs here (based on
| sentiments). And then an existing corporation with tens
| of billions of free money came along, bought Heroku ...
| and ran it into the ground. So I don't buy that you need
| to fundraise or else be outpaced, at least not by big
| corporation.
| stepbeek wrote:
| To be fair, they do call out in the article that they're
| hosting on their own hardware. Afaik Heroku has always
| been hosted on AWS which is a lot less capital-intensive
| than buying hardware.
|
| Also, Heroku was acquired in 2010. I know that the
| prevailing sentiment around here is that the acquisition
| was a mistake, but Heroku has been owned by Salesforce
| for 13 of it's 16 years of life...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You can offset burn rate with more skills. Putting a few
| machines in multiple regions is fairly cheap. If you're ok
| doing the ops yourself, you can get buy on a shoe string
| budget. I know. A startup I was part of did this ten years
| ago and the tooling to do this has only gotten easier and
| better.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that venture is intrinsically
| evil, but also companies are explicitly trading off higher
| burn rates and higher raise rounds to reduce the need to
| build all of this in house. That's not a bad idea because
| it's usually better for the business to scale as quickly as
| the sales channel can fill it rather than be stuck on
| difficult engineering roadblocks.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are
| already extremely rich would be able to start a business of
| any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical
| hardware in multiple regions
|
| You're describing the current state of the world
|
| We're there already. The entire system is built to exploit
| everybody who does not have significant capital to fight
| back against it
| willsmith72 wrote:
| It's just not though. Surely you know (or know of) people
| who've built successful businesses with the help of
| funding, and couldn't have done so without it.
|
| Just because someone takes funding, doesn't make them any
| less or a part of some "built" system. Even my favourite
| bakery could never have got started without funding -
| with debt not equity. It doesn't make him any less
| brilliant. He would've had to be extremely rich so start
| the business otherwise
| agotterer wrote:
| Not all funding is creating equal or share the same
| expectations. Borrowing money from a bank to open a
| bakery or taking an investment from friends and family to
| cover the initial startup costs is very different from
| raising venture capital money. The growth and return on
| investment expectations are wildly different.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Which is sort of natural, isn't it? The natural world is
| set up to exploit everything that does not have a defense
| against it. You adapt or you get eaten or out-competed.
| The fact that "the non-rich" have not yet realized that
| they can, in fact, band together to force more powerful
| forces to behave better, doesn't mean they can't still do
| it.
|
| Our biggest advantage is working together as a community,
| and our biggest flaw is not helping each other when we
| easily could.
| Zetice wrote:
| I am so curious why you repeatedly spit in the collective
| face of the _millions_ of small business owners in the US
| and around the world.
|
| If what you say were true, the world would exist as a
| series of 3-5 megacorps, and small businesses would not
| exist. Since they do exist, how do you square that with
| your claim that only the "extremely rich would be able to
| start a business of any size" is currently true?
| matwood wrote:
| I would also add to your point that starting a business
| is easier than it has ever been. While far from perfect,
| the internet has been an amazing equalizer.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| On the one hand, it makes it easy for you to reach
| customers.
|
| On the other hand, it makes it easy for your competitors
| to reach customers.
|
| I'd argue that, on the whole, the internet has made
| starting "just an idea and a garage" businesses harder,
| because they now face immediate, maximally-funded
| competition. Whereas pre-Internet they would have been
| geographically/physically protected for awhile.
|
| True, net win for customers, efficiency, etc. (maybe).
| But you couldn't start a Starbucks these days.
| [deleted]
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| I agree, most businesses are very small. Large businesses
| and especially very large businesses are the exception.
|
| 4.7M of the 8M US businesses have <5 employees.
|
| https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/small-business-
| week....
|
| Starting a business requires little more than filing
| incorporation documents with your state.
|
| Growing a business to dominate a market and get crazy
| rich may require outside funding, but growing a business
| to support and maintain your individual lifestyle does
| not.
| dpc050505 wrote:
| > spit in the collective face of the millions of small
| business owners in the US and around the world.
|
| Their income is similar to that of most working
| professionals and their assets are similar to the savings
| of most working professionals. They entrepreneured
| themselves into having a job, they're not the
| investor/capitalist multimillionaires we picture when we
| think of rich people.
|
| >the world would exist as a series of 3-5 megacorps, and
| small businesses would not exist
|
| The economy exists as the 500 megacorps that make up the
| s&p 500. Small businesses just fill in the gaps and are
| for the most part beholden to the megacorps for their
| business, their supplies and/or their financing.
| Zetice wrote:
| Honest question: why are you on a site whose community is
| literally created and run by a startup accelerator?
|
| It's a given you realize how antagonistic you're being here, so
| I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Where better to talk about the downsides of VC funding?
|
| I don't think anyone wants HN to become an echo chamber that
| believes VC funding is the solution to all problems.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Curious people are allowed some latitude when historical
| performance predicts future outcomes [1]. This is "not the
| first rodeo" as it were. Agree being antagonistic is not
| welcome, but it should not be unwelcome to ask hard questions
| about how something won't end up the same.
|
| I like the Fly.io folks! But asking questions should never be
| off the table; how else would you be curious?
|
| [1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
|
| (it is unfortunate that something with so much value and
| enjoyment like HN is a product of an investment firm, but a
| component of life is compromise; enjoy it like you would a
| public good while it lasts)
| Zetice wrote:
| > My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company
| that raises venture funding.
|
| This is not what curiosity looks like, is my point.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I imagine some folks have their curiosity burn out at a
| certain point. Your point is taken.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| [flagged]
| tptacek wrote:
| _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Fair.
|
| I stand by my point though that the culture has
| significantly changed since 2012 - you of all people know
| that.
|
| Just go back and look a decade ago at when people would
| post "hey we raise all this money" posts.
|
| A full half of the comments would be like "nobody cares
| that you raise money are you actually doing something
| important?" or similar.
|
| Tbh I think it was a healthier perspective, and we need
| to bring more "hacker" back.
| Zetice wrote:
| I joined in '09 and I think _I 've_ changed pretty
| substantially, so the idea that this or any website would
| lock-in to a particular viewpoint isn't realistic IMO.
|
| And you're being _awfully_ reasonable now, once we 've
| gotten past the bombastic opening claim. I think part of
| what makes HN great is that at least sometimes we can
| skip that opening wild claim.
| esafak wrote:
| I think this is just due to the maturation of the
| community; it has grown and diversified, so enthusiast
| hackers represent a smaller proportion of it. The same
| dynamic is at play in the tech community at large.
| Zetice wrote:
| But that's a fundamentally different view than "All VC
| funding is bad"; there are tons of risks involved and many
| actors aren't good in every industry, why specifically does
| venture capital draw your ire?
| munificent wrote:
| _> why are you on a site whose community is literally created
| and run by a startup accelerator?_
|
| Why do missionaries go where no one believes their religion
| already? The idea that you must already be a believer in some
| community to participate in the community makes little sense
| and certainly isn't a good way to make progress.
|
| _> I guess my only other question is why seek attention like
| this?_
|
| Would you also characterize your own reply as mere attention
| seeking?
| Zetice wrote:
| All commenting is attention seeking, my question was: why
| do it antagonistically like this?
|
| And further, why go on a (holy) mission to convince people
| funding companies is bad? That's a weird windmill to tilt
| at...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's not a weird windmill, it's deep philosophical
| position (breakneck property ownership based anarchistic
| capitalism) that is leading to the wanton destruction of
| society across the world.
| Zetice wrote:
| How does the thing that enables society also destroy it?
| gnatman wrote:
| How do anabolic steroids, which make me big & strong,
| also kill me?
| c-hendricks wrote:
| I dunno, I think it's a growing sentiment and am glad
| they brought it up.
|
| Svelte, SolidJS, Remix, and NextJS are all tied to San
| Francisco venture capitalism and that's got me worried
| about their future.
| jwr wrote:
| This. In the long term, in a venture funded business, there is
| no outcome that is good for users.
|
| "Growth" is the focus now, until the business dies (by
| acquisition, IPO or bankrupcy, all of which are bad for users).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I tend to agree with your overall thesis, and I get
| particularly baffled when some SaaS company, whose nearly sole
| expense is payroll, feels the need to raise hundreds of
| millions of dollars, fly.io is a _cloud infrastructure_
| company.
|
| They literally run physical servers all over the world (at
| least, that's my understanding from their website). I've got to
| imagine then that this business has huge capital costs, and
| it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive
| business without outside capital.
|
| I don't disagree with your main point. Everyone has seen
| "enshittification" eventually take over all tech startups as
| they switch the focus from satisfying users to satisfying
| investors. But I just don't see how you build a business that
| requires running servers all over the world without a lot of
| capital.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> it 's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive
| business without outside capital._
|
| That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud
| computing, right? You don't spend what you don't need _right
| now_.
|
| But Fly.io makes a good point about reaching critical mass to
| discuss better prices from their vendors. I can totally
| understand that.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second)
| cloud computing, right?
|
| Maybe I misunderstood your point, but that's the promise
| for cloud computing _customers_. Fly.io is a cloud
| computing _provider_ , and those are all hugely capital
| intensive businesses.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Fly.io can be a cloud computing provider while being a
| cloud computing customer, just like Heroku and others.
| aarondf wrote:
| They can be (in theory), but aren't (in reality)
| tedmiston wrote:
| > They literally run physical servers all over the world ...
| I've got to imagine then that this business has huge capital
| costs, and it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital
| intensive business without outside capital.
|
| I genuinely struggle to understand how Fly.io managed
| (manages) to have this much physical server presence to date,
| having raised only ~$16M prior to this round. Hire a dozen
| engineers and that money starts to go fast. The regions page
| [1] shows 34 cities largely across 4 continents, but
| technically across 6 if you count the 1 region each in Africa
| and Australia.
|
| Maybe they have managed to get inside other existing cloud's
| data centers and it's not literally _their_ own physical
| hardware, or behind-the-scenes they are leasing collocated
| servers, etc.
|
| I would love some insight here if one of the founders in the
| thread sees this.
|
| [1]: https://fly.io/docs/reference/regions/
| inconceivable wrote:
| you can finance new hardware and rack in a managed colo for
| extremely cheap. like really cheap.
|
| i was in this business until a couple of years ago.
|
| we'd quote prices for potential customers currently in
| public cloud and they literally wouldn't believe us. it
| actually became an impediment in the sales cycle and part
| of the reason we sold. people are dumb, but i'd be even
| dumber if i expected them to change for my benefit.
| tptacek wrote:
| The short answer is that none of our regions are so big
| that we have to own our own top-of-rack switching yet
| (though some are getting close), so we can take a random
| spot in (say) an Equinix rack, rather than having to
| engineer a network (we run our own BGP for Anycast, but our
| uplinks are just DAC connections to our upstream providers
| switches.
|
| For what it's worth: we've been on our own hardware ever
| since we launched, long before the 14MM Intel/Dell round.
| It's really the only way we can see to make the margins
| make sense. A big part of the premise of AWS and GCP is
| that they're allocating hyperscaler-grade resources to the
| task of making sure they claim most of the margins in
| hosting things on their own platform, not middlemen ---
| though that may be more true for some services (like EC2)
| than others (like S3).
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Are you in the big financial services Equinix data-
| centres?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's a good question, but the linked article says
| unambiguously near the bottom that they run their own
| hardware:
|
| > Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money
|
| > Here's what we think it takes to build this kind of
| platform:
|
| > A hardware fleet. Fly.io has always run on its own
| hardware. There are fun, technical, "control your own
| destiny" reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on
| top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. If
| you want to get people to build apps on your platform, you
| need a shot at being around 10 years from now. Hardware is
| what makes the margins work.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that
| raises venture funding
|
| you're basically going to be prevented from using anything that
| isn't an established enterprise(which are also beholden to
| shareholders) or consumer apps. You can't bootstrap anything
| that requires significant R&D or infrastructure unless the
| founder is already rich
|
| This post seems to be referencing the Reddit API situation. The
| solution is to not make your company reliant on a single API ,
| pretty sure with Fly you can deploy Docker containers so you
| could always switch easily if they tried to price gouge. If
| something is a critical component of your business you should
| always plan to be able to switch providers in a hurry for any
| number of reasons
| berkle4455 wrote:
| I don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already
| rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8
| vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the
| same.
| flagged24 wrote:
| It's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io
| has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of
| EUR30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess
| an easy deploy story ?
| bombela wrote:
| You pay for not having to manage anything yourself or hire
| somebody dedicated to do so. How much is that worth?
| dathinab wrote:
| Developer time is pretty costy and if you can save a lot of
| dev time a noticeable higher running cost can be well worth
| it for some companies (like smaller companies, startups
| which have still a fluent changing business model etc.).
|
| Through also it's not a fair compression because for the
| kind of services where being close to the edge and
| redundant over many places matters Hetzner isn't even an
| option. AWS maybe, but AWS is also pain in my experience.
| [deleted]
| danenania wrote:
| Is fly vs Hetzner really apples to apples though? A more apt
| comparison would be to AWS, GCP, and Azure no?
| berkle4455 wrote:
| How isn't? You're paying for a VM with access to a slice of
| resources. Yes fly.io offers some clever deployment and
| routing, but it's still your code running on a VM.
| danenania wrote:
| You could ask the same question about why Hetzner is so
| much cheaper than the big cloud providers. If there
| weren't any tradeoffs, presumably every company running
| containers or VMs on a big cloud would move to Hetzner
| and save 80%. Why isn't that happening?
|
| Whatever the answer is, it's probably the same answer for
| why many companies would likely be willing to pay more
| for fly.io than Hetzner as well.
| themagician wrote:
| Welcome to capitalism, mate. Without exploitation there is no
| excess, no abundance. Without exploitation there are no
| profits.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They are a web hosting company, like AWS (etc.), so at least
| you can shift your stuff to somewhere else if it gets too
| pricey.
|
| The "etc." is basically thousands of other companies.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Only said by someone who hasn't done large scale migrations.
| It's never that easy. It's always disruptive.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Sure, but if you are a startup and your bill went from
| $10,000/m (say this is comparable to AWS) to $100,000/m
| because the fly investors said so, you would probably move?
| Or go bust? Either way it is not good game theoretically
| for the vendor to do that.
|
| And if they did they also wont get the enterprise customers
| who are considering conservative alternatives.
| ajsharp wrote:
| Complaining about companies raising venture capital on hacker
| news! What!? No way!?
|
| This is going to sound _wild_ , but believe it or not it takes
| quite a bit of _capital_ to reserve capacity in data centers
| ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your _core
| value prop_ of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This
| used to just be called making a capital investment (because it
| takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to
| whine about venture capital.
|
| You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and
| running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency
| (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your
| own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own
| remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7
| coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it
| asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit
| takes...capital.
|
| Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not
| from venture capital firms?
|
| Honestly, do you even know _what_ you 're bitching about? A
| theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b.
| _would not exist_ if fly did not theoretically create a product
| so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is
| not a monopoly, it 's market dominance; they are very
| different)?
|
| And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably
| _should_ raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is
| literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and
| orders of magnitude easier.
|
| Take your aimless cope elsewhere.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Here is an alternative, unpopular (for the narrative like in
| the above post) hot take.
|
| Nothing is forever. Five years is a long time. People need
| motivation. Enjoy and make use of things while they last.
| Nobody owes you anything.
|
| But you have options.
|
| You can have a business genius build a company that delivers
| great product forever without grinding employees into the dust,
| burning up founders and still outmaneuvering competitors.
|
| You can have no product or a company going under because
| founders have stretched them thin, burned out and went broke
| ruining their lives pursuing a good idea that morphed into a
| sunken cost.
|
| Or you can crazy pricing models justified by the desire to live
| like a VC LP while shipping a 3rd party API-dependent cute app.
| But without VC!
|
| Or you can have a VC-subsidized business that ships a product
| at ridiculously low prices, locks you in for some 3-5 years and
| then goes ballistic and becomes unusable. But it's been five
| years of a very good run, FIVE YEARS. And then the next will
| come to take their place.
|
| Reading how five years is a short timeline for a low-cost-high-
| value product is wild. Now that's some entitlement.
| cphajduk wrote:
| I would partially disagree. I think your statements are true,
| but only for companies that raise investments on the promise of
| scaling to greater profitability, but ultimately fail to
| deliver. If the founders delude themselves or are overly
| optimistic, the only recourse they have to investors is to
| gouge the customer.
|
| Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. Not 'as much as
| possible'
| tlogan wrote:
| > Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. > Not 'as
| much as possible'
|
| Money is like sex - only too much is enough.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and
| employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
|
| I mean... raising prices [?] "selling out any pretense..."
|
| You're upset that a growing business lowers prices to grow
| faster? Ok, but maybe relax a little. You're upset that
| advertising-based businesses eventually shut down the ad-free
| clients that use the API? Ok, but maybe relax a little.
|
| A business grows with low prices and loses some customers not
| willing to pay when they put up prices that reflect longer term
| sustainability. That happens, why does it have to be a moral
| outrage?
|
| Yeah, if you're using a VC-backed startup expect the cheap
| services to get pulled back on when they hit IPO time.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, I follow the same view, I've stopped paying attention to
| companies that raise venture capital or are publicly traded
| (aka, they don't truly own the direction of their own
| business). Whatever good is there is _always_ subverted by the
| persistent need for "growth" and "increasing engagement" and
| hitting metrics that are pleasing to investors. It'll start out
| pretty minor, but the trajectory is persistently altered at
| nearly every single point of decision. The sway is there, no
| matter what, and sometimes major decisions are driven solely by
| "it's what our stakeholders want/need", and the thought of the
| end-user of the software is practically an afterthought or
| side-effect.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| I can understand how you might think investors mis-align the
| business with customers, but this isn't necessarily true.
|
| First, businesses aren't in the business of leaving money on
| the table. That is fine for a non-profit, but ultimately they
| need to weigh money making with customer satisfaction and
| growth. It's crazy to think a business should not optimize
| here.
|
| Second, you're conflating venture-funded consumer businesses
| with B2B businesses. Consumer businesses with venture funding
| are typically going to fuel growth/momentum by doing things
| which don't scale. But eventually push comes to shove. B2B
| business models are usually more transparent about what is a
| promotion and what is not. Consumer businesses don't always
| know how the business model is going to play out to even offer
| that transparency.
|
| Third, if your business model is advertising and data is your
| moat, then when you give away your data via API to promote
| distribution, yes you run into an issue later on when you need
| to advertise or you have underinvested somewhere (in Reddit's
| case it was mobile). For Reddit or Twitter, these mobile apps
| were profiting off their users/data while taking on none of the
| costs (infrastructure, moderation, etc.), and limiting their
| means of monetizing themselves. You don't need an investor to
| tell you that isn't in your long term interest.
| kart23 wrote:
| https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should...
|
| > If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly
| Apps, there are many great options, including:
|
| Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a
| company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's
| direct competitors.
| danieljacksonno wrote:
| What? Of course they should. It shows they care about their
| customers, and that they are confident in their use case and
| honest when they say what they are a good fit for or not
| kart23 wrote:
| i guess, but when you do this it increases the amount of
| people who think, "if i'm already going to this company for
| my database and they offer the same things fly does, why not
| just go there?"
| tpetry wrote:
| It will take them months to build something competing. Should
| they tell everyone to bot fly because they don't have their own
| database solution yet?
| tptacek wrote:
| Even if I granted your premise that these are direct
| competitors (they most certainly aren't)... why not?
| duxup wrote:
| "We raised a bunch of money"
|
| Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that
| phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service.
|
| It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow
| of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a
| realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or
| platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless
| of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will
| be.
|
| It's unfortunate but for me it's not a phrase I want to see. I
| want to hear how they are profitable based on their operations
| and paying customers or other non VC or IPO type income. That
| gives me confidence in their stability.
|
| To be clear that's not a disagreement with the title or blog,
| seems like a fine article that is fairly up front, but it's hard
| for me to really see "we raised a bunch of money" as a positive
| from a customer perspective anymore.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant
| flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for
| isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system
| or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger
| regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder
| the fall will be.
|
| This is where I always get burned. As they get larger and
| larger, and the product gets more complex, they see it as value
| that I'm not paying for, but I see it as negative value because
| I'm forced to deal with all the added complexity that I don't
| even want. Then, one day, they decide I shouldn't be
| "freeloading" on their super awesome platform and change
| pricing to something that isn't even close to reasonable for
| me.
|
| It's like hiring someone to cut your grass and a few years
| later you go outside to find 3 guys on riding lawnmowers
| telling you that prices are going up because _obviously_ you
| 're not paying enough to cover the costs of the service you're
| getting. It's not my fault they scaled their business to
| accommodate customers with 10 acre lawns and assumed I needed
| the same level of service, but I'm the one left without lawn
| care.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that's an excellent description
| aeyes wrote:
| Also the guy who you hired to cut your grass now also lugs
| around all the tools to take care of your pool, your car and
| your house. Take all or nothing.
| duxup wrote:
| And your lawn guy's office has a pool.
| snowstormsun wrote:
| Also, the lawn guy now has a pricing tier for different
| grass heights that all in the end take the same amount of
| work.
| mlloyd wrote:
| But your lawn guy stays in business - which is relevant
| to them and to you (for as long as you're a customer). If
| the market is efficient, there should be reasonable
| competition that you can switch to that more aligns with
| your needs.
| jrumbut wrote:
| My lawn guy, and his competitor, just got acquired by a
| company that only mows the median strips along highways.
| malfist wrote:
| My lawn guy got shut down by google.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Except it's more like you originally purchased turf
| that's compatible with the provider's lawnmowers and,
| while you thought they were cutting the lawn, they were
| busy building a moat around your property. So now,
| switching involved ripping out the old turf, filling in
| the moat, and having new turf installed.
|
| Then you realize that by the time you pay off the capital
| investments needed to switch to a new provider they'll be
| pulling the same stunt and you should've learned how to
| cut the grass on your own.
| ransackdev wrote:
| https://imgflip.com/i/7qwwn2
| maliker wrote:
| Probably a couple more years of good service until they get
| acquired. They're leaps and bounds better than the container
| services on AWS and Azure, solidly better than the GCP one.
| Seems like they could sell to get their exits before too long.
| Although I would be very happy if they had the pain tolerance
| to continue as their own company.
| belfalas wrote:
| _> Probably a couple more years of good service until they
| get acquired._
|
| Solid prediction. It is more likely than unlikely that this
| will be the outcome. Once you raise VC funds the exit clock
| starts ticking.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Probably a couple more years of good service until they
| get acquired._
|
| (not privy to inside information) As a customer that would be
| a catastrophic outcome. Reckon Fly.io could avoid the
| temptation better than most given the founding team has
| already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel
| the urge to sell out again.
| belfalas wrote:
| _> Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than
| most given the founding team has already had one exit
| (mongohq /compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell
| out again._
|
| "Yes John, I used to think that too...but you see, if we
| sell then we unlock more opportunities that will be
| quite...nourishing...for the business."
|
| In other words, it's really easy to avoid temptation when
| it's not staring you in the face.
| michaeldwan wrote:
| As an employee that would be a catastrophic outcome.
| maliker wrote:
| flyctl getting rolled into aws cli (or boto3 shudder) would
| definitely hurt
| tebbers wrote:
| I'm convinced that Cloudflare will buy them for their future
| container offering.
| grog454 wrote:
| > Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point
| that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service.
|
| Any time I read an announcement like this I refresh my
| knowledge of competitors and make a mental note that it might
| be time to switch soon.
|
| > It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant
| flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for
| isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system
| or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger
| regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder
| the fall will be.
|
| If you're an investor that's a valid concern. But as a user?
| I've been happy to have VC funding subsidize my food via Hello
| Fresh etc. whenever I'm inclined.
| duxup wrote:
| For one off transactions I am happy to ride the VC train.
|
| For anything I want to trust or rely on, or it is a nice n
| trivial task to switch I start to worry.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > If you're an investor that's a valid concern. But as a
| user? I've been happy to have VC finding subsidize my food
| via Hello Fresh etc. whenever I'm inclined.
|
| It's not the same though because you're the end consumer in
| that scenario and there's no downside to the business
| disappearing tomorrow.
|
| Instead, imagine if you built a restaurant serving food you
| get from Hello Fresh. How do you price your meals to ensure
| you're covering the _true_ cost of you inputs? Can you
| compete with the guy down the street that isn 't smart enough
| to realize part of their supply chain is being subsidized in
| an unsustainable way? Probably not.
|
| The whole setup simply makes for bad economics IMO. I'm glad
| people in tech are finally catching on that VC money is the
| equivalent of an unsustainable, hidden subsidy that's
| difficult (or impossible) to calculate.
| ris58h wrote:
| Yeah, my FOSS web-app that used a free plan was shutdown by
| Heroku a week ago. Never again.
| kwar13 wrote:
| I feel you! Just had to redeploy mine on another free hosting
| service.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| In the same boat.
|
| I want to see a clear sensible path to sustainable
| profitability for my core software vendors and I want to see
| some competition, not too much not too less, just enough.
|
| Unfortunately, very very few companies fall in that narrow
| category
| hanspeter wrote:
| That's interesting.
|
| When I see such a message from a service where I'm a customer,
| it removes worry.
|
| - It validates the product.
|
| - It tells me that they're more likely to succeed than their
| competitors.
|
| - I'm confident they won't go away anytime soon.
|
| - I expect them to improve their product faster.
| duxup wrote:
| Gotta say I'm a little surprised, VC deciding to give money
| to me doesn't indicate any of that.
|
| To me that whole list is determined by actually turning a
| profit based on your operations, not some VC.
| josephd79 wrote:
| I agree, here comes the feature creep. Decisions are made on
| "What do I have to do to keep my investors happy" not what's
| best for the product.
| tptacek wrote:
| We've been VC funded for many years, so I guess everything
| we've been doing is creep!
| lawrencechen wrote:
| > There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you
| can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the
| kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript.
|
| Playful jab on Cloudflare and Deno. Would be interesting if Fly
| took up hosting "WASM containers" in addition to Docker
| containers.
| Havoc wrote:
| Cloudflare works are/can be wasm too btw
| ignoramous wrote:
| That's a jab at wasmer, fermyon et al
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508077), me thinks.
|
| I think, the jab on Cloudflare was the "get a salesperson to
| call" part.
| OriginalMrPink wrote:
| The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing
| burger.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty
| noteworthy to me.
|
| That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/.
| lazyant wrote:
| Not even 14 jobs, there's only one (or two) open positions
| listed there.
| tptacek wrote:
| We'll be hiring for many of these positions again shortly.
| We weren't funding constrained, just people constrained;
| there are whole sprawling threads on HN about how annoyed
| we managed to make some people (a small minority of
| applicants, but that doesn't make it any easier for us to
| metabolize) with our responsiveness in our hiring process.
| We halted most hiring to retool and nail down hiring
| processes, and also to onboard all the people we hired (so
| they can help us do more hiring stuff).
|
| Raising lots of money to hire 2 people is a funny flex, so
| I sort of wanted to leave this unanswered, but I also don't
| want to miss an opportunity to put on a hairshirt and talk
| about things we fucked up.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Oh, damn, I didn't even notice that the job is listed
| alongside a "no positions"
| OriginalMrPink wrote:
| I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific
| what I don't like about their communication.
|
| "$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you
| giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares?
| Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the
| same time.
|
| "There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny
| Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the
| Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures."
| I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already
| wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef,
| especially after stating: "Why do startups write
| announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There
| are lots of reasons, most of them dumb."
|
| I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says
| it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow,
| so chill, bruv.
| comice wrote:
| > We're all adults here, we can talk about this stuff,
| right?
|
| _proceeds to not really talk about it_
| tptacek wrote:
| What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt
| about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as
| a customer.
| comice wrote:
| as the OP says:
|
| > but what are you giving away for this? Are founders
| selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be
| everything and nothing at the same time.
| [deleted]
| tptacek wrote:
| You get that there's a whole section of this post
| headlined "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money", right?
| comice wrote:
| yes and I reread it a few times in case I was missing
| something. I even turned my adblocker off in case it was
| removing the section that answers OP's questions but it
| didn't appear.
|
| It's obviously perfectly fine if you don't want to or
| can't answer those questions and nobody is owed answers
| to them.
|
| Just, you're known for a straight talking style so the
| omission is conspicuous.
| tptacek wrote:
| I honestly don't know what it is you're looking to hear.
| We said what we're using the money for: hardware, rolling
| out more regions, and a bunch more support and infra
| engineers.
| comice wrote:
| you are telling us what fly will be spending the money
| on.
|
| what OP is asking is, what did the investors receive in
| exchange for giving fly the money.
| tptacek wrote:
| Stock.
| comice wrote:
| this might be the weirdest conversation I've ever had on
| this weird site.
| OriginalMrPink wrote:
| "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money" doesn't answer any of
| the questions above. I've seen private equity rounds
| disguised as traditional founding rounds, which is
| neither very transparent, nor very honest. Raising 70M
| just shortly after a 25M round makes me feel like there
| was more at play then just 'raising' money tbh. But I
| might be totally off here - but therefore disclosing a
| bit more than you currently do might be really helpful.
| OriginalMrPink wrote:
| Really? What are you going to tell them after they
| signed? "You bought it, suckers!"
|
| You might have found your audience. But for me the
| tonality of the post felt way off.
| asadm wrote:
| > There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you
| can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the
| kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript.
|
| Throwing shade at cloudflare edge workers?
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Anyone familiar with an up-to-date comparison between the two
| platforms?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm in health tech and one killer feature would be being able to
| route and store an individual's requests through and data in a
| particular location. So I can deploy a health app backend that
| allows its users to decide where to put their data.
| thomasfortes wrote:
| Something like this: https://fly.io/docs/reference/dynamic-
| request-routing/#the-f...?
|
| You probably would have to handle a lot of the logic by
| yourself for privacy and security reason, but I think this is a
| nice primitive to start from.
| styren wrote:
| I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to
| profitability considering the relatively low margins for
| SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free
| tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out?
|
| Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option
| for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it
| at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 person
| team with no need to scale in sight.
| bishopsmother wrote:
| "We make decent margins right now" - Funding and longevity [0]
| (a post from July 2021).
|
| [0] https://community.fly.io/t/funding-and-longevity/1957
| SantaCruz11 wrote:
| If this market was profitable, why Salesforce removed free tier
| Heroku?
| mrkurt wrote:
| I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck,
| but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have
| good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow.
|
| We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying
| thing we've done is start with our own hardware.
|
| For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a
| lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their
| employers build better stuff over a long period of time. This
| takes _forever_ because companies-with-procurement-processes
| are designed to not buy critical infrastructure from startups.
|
| It's working for us so far, even if it's not for you yet.
| Shakahs wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious, how does the hardware investment make
| sense for a SaaS platform when bare metal can be leased as a
| service from Equinix and such? It the difference in TCO
| between bare metal you own and bare metal you lease really
| that large after factoring in the cost of all the logistics
| and labor?
| electroly wrote:
| The part I don't understand is the combination of these
| statements you posted today:
|
| > there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have
| pricing power.
|
| > We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to
|
| > the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have
| good unit margins
|
| How do these square up? How can you reliably maintain good
| margins if your competitors set your prices? And your
| competitors have the scale to, for instance, design and
| manufacture their own hardware rather than buying off-the-
| shelf chips.
|
| I would think the key would be _not_ to accept being a
| commodity whose prices can be directly compared with other
| hosters.
| tptacek wrote:
| I was hoping Kurt was going to do an extended spiel on
| hardware margins and bandwidth pricing. You should keep
| needling him for this, because it's super interesting.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I want my ip address blog post!
| wferrell wrote:
| Please Kurt!
| Dwolb wrote:
| If your customers are really SMBs it'd make sense to partner
| with low-code/no-code platforms.
|
| Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small
| brain).
| toyg wrote:
| Probably because they build their margins by overcharging
| to run the resulting apps on oversubscribed AWS instances.
| Dwolb wrote:
| Its tough when revenues are costs are mismatched.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| How hard is it to hire people who understand how a physical
| server even works these days? Probably most engineers under
| 40 have never touch a physical machine, under 30 maybe have
| never seen an ethernet cable...
| veave wrote:
| I suppose you are being facetious because what you said
| sounds absurd.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I am generalizing for a few lulz. But I've also worked
| with people who have never seen a physical server -
| they've told me. And mac dropped the ethernet port from
| their laptops years ago. I've worked in offices where
| everything is on wifi. So I'm sure you could find quite a
| lot of younger devs who have literally never seen an
| ethernet cord. Fwiw I've never seen token ring hardware.
| styren wrote:
| I'vve consulted for companies of all shapes and in many
| different industries and when it comes to container
| orchestration there are many hard requirements that platforms
| like Heroku or Render don't address. If you can carve out a
| niche for SMBs then great. Maintaining that lead in such a
| competitive segment with price sensitive customers is hard.
|
| I have no doubt that fly.io is a market leader right now just
| judging just by optics, but I think it is hard to maintain
| that lead in this segment just as I think it may be difficult
| to go upmarket with this type of product.
| esafak wrote:
| What are the biggest unaddressed concerns?
| muhammadusman wrote:
| Having left DigitalOcean for Fly.io the DX is definitely an
| improvement. I don't have any huge apps running there so can't
| say how it scales but starting out has been super easy.
| examplary_cable wrote:
| I'm currently using fly.io and I have no complains so far(most of
| the problems I had were my fault like a DNS/IP/Certification
| problem).
| pier25 wrote:
| Congrats Kurt and the Fly team!!!!
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I don't understand all these comments coming out of the woodwork
| like "oh, no - one day they may raise prices and try to be the
| bad guys". I don't plan on using fly personally, but I don't
| understand how you could look at another provider entering the
| market and parse that as a "bad thing".
| secondcoming wrote:
| Wow, it took a really long time to get to what this company
| claims to do.
|
| Spinning up VMs. It's not difficult to do this on AWS or GCP.
| davepeck wrote:
| My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the
| recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about
| databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?)
|
| Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to
| Heroku?
| Zetice wrote:
| My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the
| recent past on HN, its founders/employees/whatever swarm the
| comments to try and control the conversation, heh.
| lenocinor wrote:
| Have you seen other attempts by other companies to do this
| here, though? They often end badly. It only works for fly.io
| because they know how to read the room and aren't trying to
| do something horrible.
|
| EDIT: Oh, and they often add valuable info to what they
| posted, too.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea, tbh i've not looked closely at fly before (but am
| now), but i have seen exactly what you've said from other
| companies.
|
| The responses here do feel swarmed, but also informative,
| "honest"[1], and often interesting about tech/mindset/etc.
|
| This post swayed my upcoming DO purchase, so.. it works a
| bit at least, hah.
|
| [1]: As much as we can assume, of course.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'd never used it before I joined Fly.io, but everybody else in
| this company absolutely adored it; they're like the Rolling
| Stones to our Black Crowes, the key influence.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Most of Heroku's revenue is from Postgres. They're arguably a
| managed Postgres provider with some app hosting tooling (this
| is not fair, but an interesting way to think about Heroku).
|
| We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an
| app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in
| flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of
| apps. So Heroku felt very constrained.
|
| We see ourselves as, like, a good RPG. Quick to get going,
| rewarding and replayable when you go deep.
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| I'd dispute that MOST of the revenue is from Postgres, though
| it is likely a very large double digit percentage of revenue.
|
| Their managed Postgres got an unfair advantage early on by
| being the default. With a new rails app you were just given a
| Heroku Postgres database. Heroku's Postgres offering was over
| 5 years ahead of RDS Postgres and a large part of the reason
| Amazon added support for Postgres for years they fought it,
| but eventually had to give into the constant customer
| request. Unfortunately that innovation of Postgres has
| stalled out a bit over time due to Salesforce starvation.
|
| I do admit for what people think of as PaaS the Postgres
| revenue is significant, the part people would probably be
| surprised about is how much revenue the add-ons marketplace
| constitutes.
|
| Interestingly New Relic got the same privileged experience in
| the early days and it resulted in the same type of revenue
| and mass adoption for New Relic.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| How is fly.io different (or even better) than just fronting your
| entire app, including the dynamic content with cloudfront or
| another CDN? The CDN is close to the client giving you low
| latency ssl setup, which can be significant.
|
| I get that this doesn't push your app servers to the edge, but
| even if you did that you still pay the latency cost of hitting
| your database in the bunker in Virginia. For many (most?) apps
| this seems worse as you are making many round trips to the db for
| a single web request. I would rather pay the latency cost on the
| web request, and have fast access to the database from the app
| server.
|
| Seems like fly's target audience is mostly static content?
| tptacek wrote:
| The exact opposite: we're a fullstack platform, so our target
| audience is largely people who _don 't_ just host static
| Javascript.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Maybe I'm mis-understanding the "Deploy App Servers Close to
| Your Users" thing. I don't get how moving your app servers
| far from your database makes things faster. Typically the app
| is more chatty with the db than with the client. So it is
| better for your app and db servers to be close together, even
| if they are far from some segment of users. If fly made
| distributed databases "heroku easy" that would be impressive,
| but it seems that's not a part of the offering?
| https://fly.io/docs/database-storage-guides/#other-
| storage-a...
| tptacek wrote:
| We have a "built-in" (for lack of a better term --- it's
| just another Fly app) multi-region single-write-leader
| clustered Postgres offering, but people also run their own
| databases directly here; the core feature is regionalized
| durable NVMe storage.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, with a big disclaimer that "this is not managed
| Postgres" [1] and a list of alternatives at the end. As a
| hobbyist building a small website for fun, I took the
| hint and chose one of those.
|
| You get to choose a region for your database, so now I'm
| thinking about how I want to deal with that.
|
| [1] https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-
| you-should...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It's gonna be a sad day when they get bought by a larger company
| and this writing style is crushed by corporate monotony.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| See also the Match Group moment for the OkCupid blog, the
| Oracle moment for Renesys/DynResearch.
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Since you're hosting your own hardware, one request: if you end
| up doing managed Postgres, _please_ give customers as much fast,
| local NVMe storage as they can use. 1M IOPS? Done. 10TB database
| on local NVMe? No problem.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Local NVMe makes this a much more fun project than it would
| have been 10 years ago.
| killthebuddha wrote:
| It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern
| perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great
| place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring
| inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is
| it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how
| trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the
| only customers who would need globally distributed app servers
| are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers
| because they've already got extremely mature platforms with
| globally distributed data stores. It makes me feel like I'm
| misunderstanding something fundamental about internet application
| architectures.
| esafak wrote:
| It means you can pick them without worrying about whether your
| startup will have to migrate once it scales.
| logifail wrote:
| > without worrying about whether your startup will have to
| migrate once it scales
|
| ... except "once it scales", you realise that you're paying
| through the nose for cloud services "because growth", so you
| end up looking at on-prem again, and finally decide it's
| better value?
| esafak wrote:
| At that scale you have discounted multi-year agreements.
| It's a good problem to have.
| pphysch wrote:
| It's the age old conundrum where every other startup presumes
| they will hit "Google-scale" and therefore needs the latest
| shiny Google-scale architecture from day 1, whether that is
| K8s, SPA, GraphQL, or edge deployments.
|
| Sell spades during a gold rush.
| joshcanhelp wrote:
| A but if a side note but ... their jobs page is pretty great.
| Nothing available but they already have very specific and
| interesting descriptions written for all the positions they have
| or expect to have. Feels like they are being very mindful about
| the company they are building.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| " The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD
| apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition
| meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with
| so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county
| Board of Supervisors."
|
| So true it hurts
| sneak wrote:
| How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that
| their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it?
|
| Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on
| their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky
| voice.
|
| If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly
| (industry) famous author.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's great, and it shows in their docs also.
|
| Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that
| became rote and boring.
| jeremy_k wrote:
| I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are
| consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much
| of their success is related to the product marketing as well?
| swyx wrote:
| theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
| xNeil wrote:
| Genuine question - what does being a hacker have to do with
| being an author?
| sneak wrote:
| It's like that scene at the end of Dr Strangelove - "why
| didn't you tell the world, eh?!"
|
| Doing stuff isn't enough - you also need to communicate to
| the Earth that you have done stuff.
| xeromal wrote:
| A lot of the famous SF folk are known for being a bit
| opinionated and snarky in their writing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hard to say but good devrel drives grassroots adoption.
| Ultimately, though, VCs no longer will fund without revenue
| growth in addition to user growth.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Does VC like snarky?
|
| Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive
| manner is the cost of the amazing product.
|
| In a corpo it's sleazy
| [deleted]
| kkielhofner wrote:
| People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind
| people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with
| "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of
| "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand
| scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the
| end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional
| concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the
| ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability
| issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the
| place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc.
|
| I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with
| their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no
| concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the
| cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily
| relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may
| take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next
| crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead
| of AWS and friends.
|
| When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin
| to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be
| described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and
| not even a consideration.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I work at AWS all opinions are my own.
|
| AWS does have local zones and has Lambda at Edge. I will be
| the first to admit though that the local zones are tied to
| regional zones and that some global services are tied to us-
| east-1 like IAM.
| kortilla wrote:
| The realities of regions don't go away. It's a primitive to
| save you money. If a new entrant doesn't have it they are
| either just operating in one region or you're paying cross-
| region prices for everything.
| 015a wrote:
| It really doesn't though. Sure, it would if the difference
| is only "16 mega-regions (regional-model) versus 300 mini-
| regions (edge)". But that's not the difference.
|
| The actual difference, at least how Cloudflare pushes it,
| is in the software; its a higher layer of abstraction; that
| customers get to stop thinking about regions and locations.
| Your software is global; its deployed everywhere; it runs
| everywhere.
|
| This is ENTIRELY antithetical to everything on AWS except
| CloudFront, Route53, IAM(ish), maybe a couple other minor
| services. Every Single Thing Every Single AWS Customer
| configures beyond those global services forces you into a
| region. Want to deploy a lambda function? Which region
| would you like? Pricing and available products is different
| in every region. Fronting it with an API? Where would you
| like that API Gateway? We'll put CloudFront in front of it
| so its a bit faster for ya, its global(ish), don't worry.
|
| In a no-true-scottsman true-edge world, this goes out the
| window. Cloudflare Workers is like this; D1 is kinda-ish-
| there-ish; R2 isn't. Here's the code; spider it across the
| world; automatically route clients to your closest PoP. No
| regions. No locations.
|
| Its not obvious that AWS will ever make meaningful moves to
| a world like this, for a ton of reasons, but most
| meaningfully: it requires customer demand; but AWS's
| existing customers aren't demanding it, because AWS's
| customers are old CTOs worried about past quarters too much
| to think about the next one. The younger, smarter,
| potential customers who recognize how valuable this is
| aren't AWS's customers; so AWS never hears from them
| (which, by the way, should more generally concern Amazon's
| investors; their "relentless customer driven" approach to
| their products is great for a few decades, but its
| absolutely true that most of the time customers just want a
| faster horse, and you're not hearing from the people who
| aren't your customers because you've never solved their
| problems before). So, Amazon has dumped billions upon
| billions into their couple-dozen giga-regions; you _cannot_
| pivot that into hundreds upon hundreds of mini-regions like
| what Cloudflare (and to a lesser but still awesome degree
| Fly) has.
|
| Vercel is _the best_ case study on this. They are exploding
| in popularity. They don 't run any of their own infra
| afaik, to be clear, but they whitelabel products from
| Cloudflare, Neon, and others; all Edge infra providers. No
| one on Vercel is cross-shopping AWS, and AWS has nothing
| that feels competitive to what Vercel offers. They can't
| compete.
|
| The outcome, in maybe 10-20 years, of this landscape feels
| _really_ obvious right now, but AWS 's size and the insane
| scale of their investment into "how we did things in 2010"
| will turn them into the next IBM. Some would say they
| already are. There's nothing they can do about it. They're
| not making the right investments. Even if they wanted to,
| they can't at the necessary scale, because what they're
| doing is working right now and their existing customers
| keep forcing them to spend more money building more
| structures, more racks, more blades, all in Ashburn VA.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar
| with) are in wild opposition to this view.
|
| I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or
| geography in their product line other than geo-routing for
| load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to
| do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in
| headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you
| have no idea.
|
| Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are
| substantially cheaper and offer better availability and
| response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors.
| Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as
| they move further and further in (out?).
|
| One would expect with them having the ability to allocate
| supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost
| basis is substantially better than having customer facing
| and controlled region-based resources that still need to be
| built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND
| maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be
| anywhere near "elastic".
| aeyes wrote:
| Cloudflare also depends on investor money, they haven't
| made a profit ever and continue to just throw stuff at
| the wall to grow.
|
| At some point in time they'll have to start thinking
| about profitability.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| It's important to qualify this though. E.g. Amazon was
| not profitable for a very long time, but only because
| they furiously reinvested everything. They could've
| turned profitable at any time.
|
| Assuming Cloudflare is a similar case to Amazon: ie they
| could turn profitable at any time but choose to reinvest
| those profits immediately into more business, that is a
| very good spot to be in.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Big assumption?
| grog454 wrote:
| > Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care
|
| Glad that works for you but for my game servers edge
| computing is not ideal and generally currently not even
| applicable.
| SantaCruz11 wrote:
| Who do you use for game server edge computing? Edgegap?
| asim wrote:
| THIS. No one cares about regions, you just care that the app
| is fast and globally available. The way we did things is a
| relic of the past and everyone mimics it because trying to
| guide new user behaviour is hard. The reality is we just need
| the app to be globally deployed with a globally distributed
| database and anycast DNS to route you to the local most DC.
| There's a lot more to it, have built this architecture more
| than a couple times, but it all needs to be in the service of
| something and if you're UX isn't better than the next guy, it
| won't matter much.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| This is MAY be true consumer applications and even then not
| all.
|
| But it is rarely true for enterprise customers. They want
| the guarantees their data never leaves certain regions even
| in a request along with other security and compliance
| guarantees.
| makestuff wrote:
| Regions do matter for stuff like GDPR though. It is
| beneficial to know that all of the data is in the EU region
| and will stay there.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| As a counterpoint, anyone working with compliance data
| needs to know and be certain that data does not cross geo-
| boundaries. Intelligence data for US gov't agencies must
| typically be kept stateside: AWS uses the GovCloud region
| specifically for satisfying gov compliance requirements.
|
| Passing HIPAA data through other countries when not needed
| to is generally frowned upon - data should be kept as local
| as reasonably possible. I haven't worked with GDPR
| requirements but I have heard they are similar. AWS solved
| this problem well with regions. I'm curious what other
| providers that are "regionless" do to solve the compliance
| problem.
| kentonv wrote:
| Compliance is a completely different conversation.
|
| In the Cloudflare Workers platform, we have a number of
| features to control "jurisdictions" where compute runs or
| where data is stored. These are meant for compliance, not
| for performance. Our goal is that no one has to think
| about regions for performance reasons, but certainly
| compliance issues are not going to go away -- in fact,
| they are getting more onerous over time. So features to
| control jurisdiction are likely to expand.
|
| (I'm the tech lead for Workers.)
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Cloudflare does this although to my knowledge it's not
| available without an Enterprise subscription which is the
| only thing they offer with this level of compliance
| anyway.
|
| All lower plans maybe get PCI DSS and that's it.
|
| It's a valid counter to my point - while they clearly can
| do it locking it behind an enterprise "talk to us"
| subscription is lame. That said they are generally
| customer, market, and product savvy and I suspect they
| know that any/most orgs that are able to pull off the
| broader process, etc for actual compliance with these
| requirements are in fundamentally different positions
| than some random startup with a bunch of consumer data.
|
| We're also seeing more and more ambiguity with coaching
| platform startups, etc who don't have a covered entity in
| sight but that's a different topic for a different day.
|
| I've spent most of my career in HIPAA-relevant startups.
| Generally, I think it's actually a disservice all around
| for Amazon to basically rubber stamp these architectures
| and solutions with a HIPAA BAA so that companies _think_
| they can call themselves "HIPAA compliant". That's not
| even what it's supposed to mean, let alone the virtually
| endless issues and process that need to happen throughout
| the org for "compliant" to actually mean anything. I
| haven't reviewed it but I'm certain the AWS BAA is so
| specific and exclusionary it's trivial to step outside of
| what it covers.
|
| Yes these agreements are a piece of the puzzle but it's
| completely reckless to throw something together in AWS,
| present the BAA to a customer, and call yourselves "HIPAA
| compliant". Savvy customers, investors, etc will call you
| out but otherwise it's mostly just a matter of time
| before you discover your standalone AWS BAA is actually
| just one of the things on a 50 point (or whatever)
| checklist.
| cnity wrote:
| The question of whether "the edge" takes off will come down
| to whether or not the culture at large will swallow the
| illusion at its heart. You cannot remove the concept of a
| region any more than you can remove the concept of "the
| computer" in a cloud environment.
| pests wrote:
| > any more than you can remove the concept of "the
| computer" in a cloud environment
|
| But that's just not true. Tons of cloud services completely
| abstract the computer out of the picture. You are paying
| for capacity or throughput as an abstract unit of cost and
| the cloud configures as many computers as needed to run
| your request. You never interact with anything resembling a
| computer in this situation.
| lightbendover wrote:
| Except, you _always_ interact with computerS no matter
| what provider or architecture you use. It 's inescapable
| as long as you're doing business in software. The trade-
| offs in architecture and regionality do NOT go away just
| because a company abstracts over it. They may be able to
| set up read replicas and consensus on the fly and be able
| to detect when various approaches make the most sense,
| but you are still at the mercy of the accompanying
| constraints. For most use cases, none of this may matter.
| When you do run into a use case where it matters, you
| should be fully aware of what trade-offs you're making
| and have control over them.
|
| Not to mention, regions matter when you're serious.
| GDPR/DSA/DMA/India/China -- the list goes on. Certain
| data must live in certain bubbles.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| "The cloud is just someone else's computer" - that ship
| sailed at least a decade ago.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| > It may take a generation or so to get there but more and
| more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things
| like Fly instead of AWS and friends.
|
| I'm currently at a startup that started on Aptible a few
| years ago because there was a lack of expertise in systems
| development. We're now in the process of migrating to AWS
| natively because of cost savings (it's why I was hired).
| Aptible is costing us 3-4x what native AWS will. Yes, we're
| incurring some operational overhead, but the automation and
| tooling for managing infra is reasonably mature (Terragrunt &
| Terraform aren't perfect, but they work well enough).
|
| Ultimately, startups may _start_ with higher-level cloud
| providers, but they 'll eventually migrate to lower-level
| providers eventually. At the higher end of the growth curve,
| companies likely wind up getting back to on-prem in some way.
| bfung wrote:
| Stateless compute is relatively simple to be region-less, but
| even fly's homepage has a map of regions.
|
| When state is introduced, then CAP/PACELC distributed systems
| issues arise, and figuring out approaches to deal with them
| are a must. Read fly's Postgres docs, and regions come right
| back in.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > When state is introduced
|
| Only the most trivial business systems can operate without
| _any_ state.
|
| If your application has any sort of _shared, mutable_
| state, you absolutely need to pick a region, or go really
| deep into the EC /consensus/clustering rabbit hole. With a
| dedicated region with 1 big DB, you can achieve latency
| figures (over the shared state) that would be infeasible
| with other schemes. Serializing transactions in a
| distributed manner is a circus compared to what Postgres
| has to do to achieve the same.
|
| For better or worse, sticking a big SQL database in exactly
| one region will almost always be the best path for most
| forms of business. If latency/edge are _still_ a concern at
| this point, that 's when we maybe start talking about more
| specific geographies and standing up read replicas in those
| regions. In my experience, if you are peddling B2B webapps,
| no one will ever complain about east vs west coast latency
| unless you actually screwed something up in code.
| swyx wrote:
| im relatively well read on databases and couldnt figure
| out - what is the EC in your comment? EC2?
| bob1029 wrote:
| eventual consistency
| kkielhofner wrote:
| This is Fly - a much earlier stage company and them
| receiving early funding is the genesis of this entire
| discussion.
|
| I point to Cloudflare (what I'm most familiar with). Across
| their entire stack of compute, storage, db, etc product
| lines you won't see a hint of region anywhere. It just
| works, everywhere. Same with Fastly/Oracle (although they
| like Fly are quite a ways behind Cloudflare).
|
| I suspect (hope) that as Fly matures their apparent true
| goal of edge and region-less applications will mature more.
| Their compromises on region awareness for DB has always
| struck me as a more of a resource restraint compromise on
| their part than end goal. As you say these challenges are
| hard (expensive).
| bob1029 wrote:
| > you won't see a hint of region anywhere.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/learning/data-
| location/ Hint Hint description
| wnam Western North America enam Eastern North
| America weur Western Europe eeur Eastern
| Europe apac Asia-Pacific
|
| There is no free lunch here. This is always a game of
| information theory and physics at the end.
| skybrian wrote:
| "Won't see a hint of region anywhere" is an exaggeration.
|
| Here's the Durable Objects documentation [1]. Don't those
| "location hints" look like regions?
|
| Also, here's the "Data location" page for Cloudflare D1
| [2]. See "available hints" at the bottom.
|
| I think it would be more accurate to say that
| Cloudflare's architecture is designed around having lots
| of regions, automatic migrations between them, and no
| guarantee about which one you'll get. But they're still
| there.
|
| [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-
| apis/durab...
|
| [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/learning/data-
| location/
| kentonv wrote:
| These are offered more as an escape hatch in case the
| system doesn't do what you want automatically. But the
| goal is definitely for the system to do what you want
| automatically, so that no one ever has to provide these
| hints.
|
| I actually argued against adding these hints at all,
| since it confuses the messaging and most people don't
| need them... but they were easy to add and solved an
| immediate problem for a few customers, so we did.
|
| In other cases we've held firm. For example, some people
| have wanted to restrict their Workers to run in specific
| regions because the Worker made lots of requests to a
| specific back-end in that region. Instead of actually
| offering explicit hints, we built a system to detect this
| automatically: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-
| workers-smart-placeme...
|
| In any case, most people don't have to think about
| regions on Workers, and for the few that do, our goal is
| to change that.
|
| (I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
| washywashy wrote:
| Regions also important for more regulated geographies
| buf wrote:
| I'm at least 50 of them
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then
| their product.
| jchw wrote:
| Honestly though, Fly.io feels like it's off into the future
| in terms of hosting platforms. Undoubtedly they'll have to
| work on the reliability problems, not denying that - however,
| for anyone that can tolerate a bit of reliability issues,
| which to be honest, is more people than will readily admit
| it, it might just be worth the trouble for developer
| experience that legitimately feels like it's from the future.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What good is a product like this if it's not stable? Most
| folks can yolo a global infrastructure if they disregard
| SLAs...
| jchw wrote:
| It's definitely not unusably unstable, at least from my
| PoV, and in fact, I haven't really been hit by most of
| the instability personally; or at least, if I have, it
| has gone mostly unnoticed by me. I had an issue where I
| couldn't deploy for a while, but the services that were
| up seemed fine. (Disclaimer: I do not use the
| Redis/database features.)
|
| That said, the point I'm trying to make is that it is in
| fact a lot nicer to use than simply YOLOing whatever onto
| servers. This model of PaaS is basically what App Engine
| should have been. It's difficult to want to go back once
| you've used it.
| arandr0x wrote:
| I've worked on the reliability team at a place that made what
| they call an "edgy app" (long before fly, so we made our own
| stuff on baremetal) and to be fair, reliability is the actual
| challenge when you're talking multi-region seamless
| deployments of scalable web platforms. It makes or breaks
| that kind of product at least for the original market.
|
| Money doesn't contribute all that much to solving it though.
| It's usually time to make the early mistakes, continuous
| improvements, etc. But AWS had several decades to solve this,
| whereas fly clearly hasn't, so I'm not sure I'd count them
| out yet.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim
| competitive reliability to the world's most important data
| center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody
| deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3
| restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or
| that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently
| is.
|
| (The comment I'm responding to said something about people in
| glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues
| sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs,
| where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready
| for production yet.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our
| infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user
| base in the whole technology industry, and a company
| culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
| culi wrote:
| Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst
| techworkers particularly because of the honest
| transparent communication and blog posts explicitly
| admitting fuck ups
|
| Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement
| to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with
| the company, your communication usually directly
| acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase.
| This serves two purposes:
|
| 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to
| prevent specific concerns we have
|
| 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the
| same page and you're actually in touch with how your
| userbase thinks
|
| Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've
| never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained
| by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can
| also be equally out of touch.
|
| I've never seen a company rebound from losing that
| confidence
| tptacek wrote:
| If we're "honest" and "transparent", it's not a conscious
| strategy to sign up customers. It's just the easiest way
| for us to write. Meanwhile: we're a hardware-based global
| hosting company. We've always been externally funded.
| That's how you build a global hardware-backed hosting
| company, because servers and colocation and infra
| engineers are expensive.
|
| There are things that happen that disappoint customers
| that we care a lot about. Reliability issues several
| months ago absolutely fit that bill. So does hiring: we
| paused hiring for most of our engineering roles because
| we weren't happy with the experience candidates were
| getting. I don't know how "honest" and "transparent" we
| are about those things, but I do feel like when we're
| asked about them, we give straight answers.
|
| There are other things that happen that disappoint people
| that we don't care so much about. Being unhappy that we
| took external funding to build out our fleet and improve
| reliability would count as one of those things. Again
| with the straight answers: I wouldn't expect us to spend
| too much time trying to "rebound" from this announcement.
| alex_lav wrote:
| To be fair (this comment is mostly a joke), Ashburn/Loudoun
| County is pretty nice for a suburb/strip mall hell. I've
| had some really good food in that area.
| rirze wrote:
| Ashburn does not have "like three restaurants". The
| datacenter zoned part of the city has "like three
| restaurants". If you ever drove >5 minutes from those large
| shed warehouses, you'd know what you're talking about.
| mike_d wrote:
| You are probably thinking of Sterling, Chantilly, etc.
|
| Ashburn is literally like the Embassy Suites next to the
| Five Guys, the Aloft next to the taco place, Equinix,
| Digital Reality, Verizon, NTT, CenturyLink, etc.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Does PR know you are posting this? Number of restaurants is
| a measurement of hosting quality? Uptime doesn't matter?
| tptacek wrote:
| This is neither here nor there, but every time I read a
| comment like this, all I can think about is that scene in
| The Office where Dwight Schrute is screaming into his
| cell phone "Are you saying you invented paper?!"
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The Office? Dwight Schrute?
|
| ARE YOU SAYING YOU INVENTED THE OFFICE?
| xNeil wrote:
| Yeah this is pretty funny - if you speak to PR before
| posting something, it's 'PR-riddled bull** written by
| some executive', or 'corporate talk'. If you don't speak
| to PR before posting something, it's 'Did you speak to PR
| before posting this?' There's no winning.
| [deleted]
| ralgozino wrote:
| the whole point is deploying closer to your users, unless
| your customer base is the owners of those restaurants, it
| would be better to deploy to other (even all!) regions
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Well if you're right maybe in a couple years we'll see a 'We
| razed a bunch of money' post, seems on brand.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I was planning an "Our incredible journey" post, but "We
| razed a bunch of money" is much better.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| It's from the Joker school of money management. Although
| I believe he only burns his half.
| [deleted]
| awkward wrote:
| Unfortunately, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he
| could have still made a joke without making it up.
| tptacek wrote:
| We got this off the Loudoun County website! We do our
| research for these things!
| margalabargala wrote:
| While "where tradition meets innovation" is a set of words
| that the county puts on their logo, and appears to meet the
| definition of a motto, the parent is correct that the
| Official Motto is indeed "I Byde My Time".
|
| https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms
|
| "Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding
| push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official
| motto.
| https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
| tptacek wrote:
| People wonder why I'm so addicted to this site, but I
| mean, it's obvious right here, isn't it?
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > that one of them was elected to the county Board of
| Supervisors.
|
| can you explain this part of the joke?
| afterburner wrote:
| Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in
| Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections
| (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have
| significant representation in local politics. In this
| specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails
| apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to
| public service.
| titanomachy wrote:
| This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| Honestly the question felt very Llama in the sense that
| it didn't really pass my Turing test, so I couldn't
| really answer it in a way that didn't feel robotic.
| arandr0x wrote:
| In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to
| a chatbot, and it got it.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth
| to it after September 2021.
| dswalter wrote:
| The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the
| population that they elected a representative from within
| themselves.
|
| It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the
| population. What's surprising is that there are still
| humans on the county board!
|
| Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter
| suppression by English speakers against those in the county
| whose native language is x86-64.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More
| education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.
| jonluca wrote:
| This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on
| this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet
| mrkurt wrote:
| This effect is _bananas_. The internet feels remarkably
| different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.
| lobo_tuerto wrote:
| Hope you can implement a dark mode for your blog/site now that
| you are big.
|
| Or at least make it friendly to Dark Reader (a well known browser
| extension for sites that don't implement a dark mode). Currently
| all your code blocks are black rectangles under it (easy to turn
| the offending style off using dev tools).
| dorongrinstein wrote:
| Fly.io marketing is top notch. Unlike fly.io,
| https://controlplane.com lets you run at the edge, super easily
| but on any compute substrate, not just on one vendor's (Equinix).
| Your own machines, your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Hetzner,
| Linode, Contabo, etc. accounts, or on Control Plane's many
| locations in all clouds. On Control Plane you instantly define a
| "Global Virtual Cloud" made up of any location you specify (your
| own, or ours, or both). You get a GLOBAL endpoint where a
| customer in NY gets a response from aws-us-east2 for example, and
| a customer in L.A. gets a response from aws-us-west2 for example.
| Of course, AWS is just one of many locations you get run compute
| on. We're about to release a multi-master Postgres offering and
| unlike Fly.io, we're 100% K8s, but if you don't know a thing
| about K8s, you're in luck. You don't need to know a thing about
| Kubernetes. You simply get secrets management, logs, metrics,
| tracing, alerting, mutual TLS between services, service
| discovery, software defined VPN between locations, private link
| support, direct connect support, your unlimited logs, metrics,
| audit trail all included and military grade fine-grained access
| control, audit trail and extreme cost optimization - you pay by
| the millicore of CPU and MB of RAM. The best part is that you can
| mix-n-match ANY of the services of AWS, GCP and Azure (Big Table,
| RDS, DynamoDB, Active Directory, S3, etc.) and not deal with IAM
| (identity & access management) complexity. Never deal with
| credentials and go from code --> unbreakable TLS endpoint in 30
| seconds. If AWS goes down your endpoint is humming along. You get
| all the control, without the pain. If you are already a K8s
| expert and have Helm charts, CRDs, controllers and other existing
| compute artifacts, we support you out of the box. If you don't
| know cloud-native - that is OK: just check in your code, the
| platform containerizes it for you and BOOM - you get a TLS
| endpoint (with your own domain) and you'll never hear things like
| "the certificate expired, prometheus fell over, vault needs to be
| upgraded, we need a new version of Istio, etc.". I urge you to
| see a demo because a talking about it and seeing it are
| completely different things. Feel free to visit
| https://controlplane.com and I promise you will be shocked in a
| good way.
|
| Doron, CEO of Control Plane Corporation.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| What do you mean by "your own machines", especially given you
| mention Equinix who host physical servers.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Congratulations, CP looks neat. I am compelled to point out, I
| am mostly shocked by the lack of paragraphs.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Congrats! Please focus on getting your documentation cleaned up,
| your cli consistent, and bugs excised. Your platform is good, and
| doesn't need too many additional features. Make it all cleaner,
| rinse and repeat.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| I really like the "Here's what's not changing" section. Honorable
| mention for Twilio. Also, the kind of platform companies where
| you sign up and play tend to get acquired and become the kind
| where you sign up and a sales person calls you!
| ericghildyal wrote:
| I've been going through the sales gauntlet lately for a new
| company I'm working on, and it's ROUGH!
|
| I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-
| access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna
| transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the
| MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales
| person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the
| quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been
| written.
| wesleyyue wrote:
| Please implement better support for rolling back deployments!
| gaffneyc wrote:
| I'm a pretty happy Fly.io customer and glad to see the direction
| things have been going overall. While it's great to see Fly is
| getting more resources to continue improving and building the
| business I worry about the inevitable VC Countdown Clock to Exit.
|
| What does this new round mean for Fly's long term independence?
| mrkurt wrote:
| I don't think we can build a company like this without a lot of
| money.
|
| We're to the point where we're making $10-25mm capital
| expenditures in one go. And we _have_ to to optimize our own
| costs. Optimizing our own costs means long term independence.
|
| What I think I've learned about VCs is: the trick to long term
| independence is to find investors who already value the sales
| mechanism. Bottoms up, dev focused "sales" is something
| investors like, now (this was not true in 2012).
| buf wrote:
| Having grown up on Heroku, it's such a breath of fresh air to see
| companies innovating in this space. Render, Fly are the big ones,
| but even little one-man shops like Hatchbox are good enough to
| deploy medium-scale production apps.
|
| Kudos to these companies, the VCs, and the beta testers.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| Razing money or not as a self proclaimed PaaS geek I have always
| enjoyed reading fly.io blogs. Two of my favorites are How they
| run containers as VMs [1] and How they outgrew Hashicorp Nomad
| and wrote their own scheduler [2]
|
| [1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] -
| https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I am a big fan of the next gen heroku competitors. At the top of
| the list are fly.io and railway.app.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production
| workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Running (diskless) production workloads on Fly.io since 2021
| (300+ req/sec across 30+ regions). Sure you ran into problems
| almost every month back then, but not anymore. Not in my
| experience.
| reeaper wrote:
| I did have my postgresql DB on their service randomly stop once
| and didn't restart until I logged in and poked it :(
| buf wrote:
| I also don't use fly (yet) because of technical issues they
| have. They are in a really messy state at the moment.
|
| Nevertheless, I'm excited for them and continue to cheer them
| on until they mature.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Can someone remind me, what is "edge"? It it hosting server-side
| applications in a position in the network topology that minimizes
| latency to end users? Or is it that, but for static resources (so
| similar to the concept of CDN)?
| jondwillis wrote:
| It can be for both static content and dynamic
| computation/content.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's the term of art for the portions of the Internet closest
| to specific customers, and, more generally, for the notion of
| deploying things in _multiple locations, simultaneously_ such
| that they 're close to users in different cities.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| And probably to state the obvious, this is to help use cases
| where UX is negatively impacted by the latency of client <->
| server RPCs/Http requests? Are the proponents of "the edge"
| as a concept motivated largely by concern for people in
| countries far from the data centers hosting apps they are
| using, and/or with low bandwidth infrastructure?
| tptacek wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, anything above about 100ms has
| perceptible latency to end users (even if they're not
| consciously thinking about it, they're noticing it).
| Depending on your application, and how captive your users
| are, you may or may not care about this perception. If
| you're taking users through filing an insurance claim, you
| don't, because your users can't go anywhere. But if your
| users are filling a shopping cart, or paying for content
| with their attention, you care a lot more, because lag
| eventually bounces users from your site.
|
| Further, there are features that aren't really tenable
| unless you get lag under control (somehow, either by
| eliminating it or by taming it with cashing, prediction,
| and interpolation). Game servers are everyone's canonical
| example here, but really any kind of real-time feature fits
| the bill. Now, most CRUD applications don't have real-time
| features, so this might not be a big motivator. But one
| subtle bet we're making is that more apps would do
| interesting real-time things if it that latency problem was
| easy to solve.
|
| The big problem you have if you're working on these
| problems is that it's very difficult to fit into this kind
| of latency budget if all your stuff is hosted in Loudoun
| County, because the speed of light is eating most (all?) of
| that 100ms.
|
| That's the logic of wanting to get deployed in multiple
| cities simultaneously. There's more than one way to do it!
| We're just one possible solution.
| syrusakbary wrote:
| I wish they mentioned how their service competes against new-
| comers to the space such as Wasmer Edge [1]. (they kind of
| mention Javascript, I guess in reference to Cloudflare Workers,
| but they miss Wasm somehow!).
|
| In any case, congrats to their team and VCs on the round!
|
| [1] https://wasmer.io/products/edge
| techn00 wrote:
| Does fly use Equinox or something similar for their hardware?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We use Equinix Metal / Packet in some places, our own hardware
| + colo in others, and something close to colo/hardware in more.
| theossuary wrote:
| Is there any interest in working with telcos to manage MECs? It
| seems like they've finally given up on building their own
| container orchestration, and are now looking at Google's GDCE &
| Amazon's Outpost. But those fundamentally aren't good models for
| MEC.
|
| I could definitely see a really interesting future for Fly where
| you're building tech to actively follow users between towers to
| provide the lowest possible latency to apps.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > What people actually wanted to talk about, though? Databases.
|
| And they completely avoid discussing it again in this article.
|
| It would be nice if I could know what their product is for
| because it doesn't seem to be the apps I work on.
| dementik wrote:
| I presume they start discussing about it when LiteFS is matured
| enough.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is a "raised money" post. So presumably they raised money
| so they can have a database answer in the future.
| tptacek wrote:
| We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering
| now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people,
| and the platform strategy is to build durable storage
| primitives that work for as many different databases as
| possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge
| deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.
| oneneptune wrote:
| a bit off topic, but a big struggle that is growing related
| to data and databases; managing data residency. I've not
| found an easy way to handle this and countries seem to be
| passing more and more laws... it's tough for global
| applications!
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Do you have any info about how edge deployments + sqlite
| work and what kind of applications they are limited to?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Basically, LiteFS: https://github.com/superfly/litefs
|
| And then some load balancer cleverness that reroutes
| writes to a specific VM: https://fly.io/blog/globally-
| distributed-postgres/
| fishtoaster wrote:
| "Why do startups write announcements like these?"
|
| I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of
| the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can
| come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of
| tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement +
| harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free
| advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read
| tech press.
|
| There's nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I'm just surprised
| they acknowledged mercenary reasons without mentioning what I've
| seen as the most common one.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises.
| 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If
| you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in
| a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for
| embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch
| of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends
| to read tech press.
|
| It's less about "excuse for press" and more "controlling the
| narrative". Raising this amount will mean that other news
| outlets will pick up on it. Technically, as I recall, it's
| public information (I founded a company and this was all
| explained to me - but it was years ago).
|
| So if you don't publish _they will_. You 're much better off
| publishing first so that people read _your_ post, not theirs.
| eduction wrote:
| Saying it's "for press" just kicks the can down the road,
| raising the question "why do startups want press on
| announcements like these?" They do it to get out a certain
| message and leave a certain impression, usually of the
| mercenary sort the post outlines.
|
| Although I see your point about it just being to get the name
| of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary
| motivation that the post maybe did not mention.
| bearjaws wrote:
| The math is pretty straight forward.
|
| Cost to make article = $2000
|
| Article gets 100,000 views
|
| Fly.io converts 1% of views to paying customers
|
| 1,000 new customers.
|
| Revenue per customer = $10 monthly
|
| MRR goes up by $10,000
|
| Obviously I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, but there
| a pretty direct path to value.
|
| This is way more efficient than Google ads in a competitive
| space, I can only imagine hosting related ads are $3-5 per
| click...
| hgsgm wrote:
| That math works for any old blog post.
|
| Advertising a raise specifically is to get attention from
| customers and the industry as a legitimized successful
| operation.
| ryandrake wrote:
| At the very least, it's marketing. I have no idea what
| they do, as I'm not in that particular web development
| niche and don't know what an "edgy app" is, but it made
| it to the top of HN, so people like me now know at least
| that there exists a company called fly.io.
| xNeil wrote:
| You're right - I also think (personal opinion) the trust
| gained in a company by reading their blog post is greater
| than the trust gained by seeing an ad. Because I saw this
| blogpost, I trust fly.io more than I would have had I seen
| a YouTube ad of them or something of the sorts.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Startups want press in general, and closing a funding round
| is reliably something that the press will cover. (Unlike, for
| example, product or feature releases.)
| ultrasaurus wrote:
| They aren't wrong that there are some companies that feel more
| comfortable if you have more money in the bank BUT most
| companies wildly overestimate how much prospects care. Case
| studies in their industry & Gartner quadrant > $100MM in the
| bank.
|
| TL;DR: It's an appendix slide in your first meeting deck, don't
| put it up front :)
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| After the SVB collapse, hopefully they have the $100MM as
| $250K in 4000 different bank accounts to duck under those
| FDIC insurance limits.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| That would be $1 billion :-)
|
| So I guess 400 bank accounts would be enough?
| hugs wrote:
| Yup. When I was deep in the VC-fueled startup game, tech press
| did not want to write about us _at_ _all_ , unless there was
| also some kind of funding news included, too.. (I interpreted
| this as the writers knowing their readers... and only stories
| with funding announcements got the clicks...) So guess what
| happened? We would raise money, then not talk about it for up
| to 6 months until we _also_ had some new feature or product to
| launch.
|
| If people started clicking more on tech stories that _didn 't_
| have funding announcements, maybe the cycle would change... But
| it feels like we're in some kind of Prisoner's Dilemma game
| now. Those stories don't written, so they don't get the clicks,
| so they don't get written...
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Yeah, "hold off funding announcements until we've got
| something else we want to push into the news" was a pretty
| common thing in my experience as well.
|
| I'm somewhat sympathetic to both the press and the readers
| here - they want to report/read news. Events. "Company X
| continues to exist" isn't really news. And "Company X adds
| new feature Y" is rarely noteworthy news, no matter how big a
| deal it is in Company X. Sometimes new features are news if
| either the company is huge ("Amazon adds support for Foo to
| AWSBar") or it's strategically significant ("Company X adds
| feature Y, now putting it in direct competition with Company
| Z"), but I think those are the exceptions.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| To reporters, funding is 3rd-party validation that a business
| is actually worth writing about.
|
| Just like press coverage is 3rd-party validation to potential
| customers that a company is actually worth considering.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Free press == free advertising.
| andrewingram wrote:
| Linear waited nearly a year to announce a round, presumably
| because they did two in quick succession and didn't want to
| waste the PR opportunity of the second one.
| yolo3000 wrote:
| So if the bookstore doesn't think it's worth it to spend more
| than 2 hours on deploying to the edge, maybe it's not that
| important to them, or :) ?
| phaer wrote:
| I think fly.io believes that they can allow the bookstore to do
| so in less than two hours for a price where it's still
| important enough for the bookstore and profitable - in
| aggregate - for fly.io.
|
| I personally believe that could be true, but their investors
| going to find out ;)
| mrkurt wrote:
| Roughly this, yes. It's easy to run boring apps close to your
| users. Thus, people buy computer time from us instead of a
| place that runs in one city.
| davnicwil wrote:
| I've long suspected this is what you guys would end up
| focusing on (and applaud it) -almost like an OS for edge
| compute that abstracts away its details while allowing
| boring architectures built for single-point to 'just run'
| on it.
|
| But is there a limit to how boring you can go? Can you
| truly, fully abstract over distributed systems stuff like
| eventual consistency and its basically random effects on UX
| in certain usage edge cases?
|
| Or do you think 'boring' will have to meet you in the
| middle with frameworks and developer mindset also shifting
| over time to a more edge-first world?
| yolo3000 wrote:
| So change your infra to save a few hours :D I guess they have
| other compelling features.
| benzible wrote:
| Tell me you've never without telling me etc...
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > And hardware-accelerated inferencing.
|
| :eyes emoji: fly ppl please do this
| [deleted]
| h1fra wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| I love Fly.io, used it for side projects and I was very pleased
| with the UX and the free tier.
|
| The blog post is funny but the style is a bit excruciating to
| read.
| tl wrote:
| Minor nit:
|
| > The kind of platform company we want to be hasn't changed since
| 2020. Our features are all generally a command or two in flyctl,
| and they work for any app that can packaged in a container.
|
| _can be packaged_
| mattmaroon wrote:
| One of the best-written press releases I've seen for sure.
| miahwilde wrote:
| Here's what we believed in 2023: people want solutions they can
| understand in two hours.
|
| Here's what everyone actually wanted to talk about: Trust.
|
| Here's what we missed: ...
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| > Our first reason is obvious, and mercenary.
|
| even though there's a reason (or three) behind the style of the
| post, including the use of transparency, it is refreshing.
| xianshou wrote:
| Self-aware commentary like this only works if used sparingly, but
| this one is extremely effective - acknowledges the mercenary
| motivations, implicit hypocrisy, and self-aggrandization of such
| announcements while nonetheless communicating all the important
| information and succinctly breaking down a real problem that
| their platform solves. On top of that, the legitimate uses of
| funding are clearly identified, answering any questions about
| both "why" and "how much".
|
| Cheers, guys.
| brabel wrote:
| I loved it. They stayed as far away as possible for your
| traditional grandiose, jargon-filled, corporate speak we
| normally get in these announcenments. They definitely gained a
| few points with me :).
| cvwright wrote:
| > There are fun, technical, "control your own destiny" reasons to
| rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But
| it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the
| margins work.
|
| Amen to that.
|
| Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is
| still being smart with it.
|
| But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's
| potential customers _also_ run their own hardware? "
| mrkurt wrote:
| They should, probably. We have partner-like customers who are
| paying actual hardware costs and then a platform fee for us to
| manage it.
|
| You can only build so many company margins on top of capital
| expenditures.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I don't think there's enough expertise in running hardware out
| there, frankly. For a company where running hardware isn't
| their bread and butter finding and hiring people who can do it,
| and do it well, is existentially risky. It is hard enough to
| find people who can properly run on a PaaS.
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