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> As an early stage investor, I’m hard-pressed to name any tectonic shifts that have had as much impact on startup formation. Gross exaggeration. Most startups

by jeswin 7y ago

> As an early stage investor, I’m hard-pressed to name any tectonic shifts that have had as much impact on startup formation. Gross exaggeration. Most startups should worry less about 100% uptime and scaling than about sales. A dedicated server or two goes a long way, and it isn't/wasn't really that much harder.

scarface74 7y ago
It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I’ve worked in the B2B space mostly in healthcare.. When you get a sale to business where they are outsourcing a major piece of their functionality to you. You can’t shrug and not worry about uptime. If you’re building Twitter it doesn’t matter.
- jeswin 7y ago
  > It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades and most startups can begin operations without the cloud, and with the possibility of downtime. Even in healthcare there are plenty of systems where varying levels of downtime is acceptable.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.
    - adrianmsmith 7y ago
      The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.
      - aflag 7y ago
        There were cloud provider outages that lasted a long time as well. They are far from frequent, but it's not like you are immune from it ever happening if you're using aws or gcp. Anyway, I don't think uptime is the main reason to use a cloud provider. For me, the main reason is the ease to expand. You can add and remove infrastructure quite easily. If course, you can do the same in a datacenter, but in my experience it takes planning ahead a bit more than you need with a cloud provider.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  > It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. The myopia comes from experience. Startups (which aren't solely B2B Healthcare) are more often doomed by lack of customers than by other factors.
  - ci5er 7y ago
    I've never understood B2C. Why would anyone go to the trouble of starting a company without $1M in ARR commitments? To me, that sounds like a death wish, but it worked for all the new high-tech consumer facing companies we read about every day!
- aflag 7y ago
  The elastic cache sla is 99.9%. That's roughly 43 minutes per month. Do you think that's that hard to achieve given the tools we have today?
- adrianmsmith 7y ago
  Right, but at least where I work (Austria/Germany) if a healthcare provider is outsourcing their data to you, they won't allow you to use AWS anyway (data has to be on your servers, in the same country, run by a company owned in that same country). So even if you are in the situation where you have to worry about uptime, AWS isn't a solution.
  - alexeldeib 7y ago
    AWS and Azure both partner with local companies to meet the data residency/sovereignty requirements, IDK about healthcare regulation though.
taylorwc 7y ago
My point is not that 100% uptime was a tectonic shift; it's that the ability to enter a credit card and click deploy is a tectonic shift.
- jeswin 7y ago
  This was doable well before the advent of what we call now as the "cloud". My first company hosted the product on a shared hosting server, this was back in 1999. Availability was immediate once you paid. Since the early 2000s, dedicated servers were often available within an hour of payment. VM-based hosting took only minutes to get started with. Credit cards were the usual mode of payment, but PayPal was also quite popular. What I'm saying is that cloud hasn't dramatically changed life for startups in their earliest phase of existence.
  - ci5er 7y ago
    For monolithic web apps, this is almost certainly true (in my experience), but the ability to rapidly turn d/c configurations, and instantly scale to match spot demand has been a game changer (for me)

by jeswin 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I’ve worked in the B2B space mostly in healthcare.. When you get a sale to business where they are outsourcing a major piece of their functionality to you. You can’t shrug and not worry about uptime. If you’re building Twitter it doesn’t matter.

jeswin 7y ago
> It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades and most startups can begin operations without the cloud, and with the possibility of downtime. Even in healthcare there are plenty of systems where varying levels of downtime is acceptable.
- scarface74 7y ago
  In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.
  - adrianmsmith 7y ago
    The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.
    - aflag 7y ago
      There were cloud provider outages that lasted a long time as well. They are far from frequent, but it's not like you are immune from it ever happening if you're using aws or gcp. Anyway, I don't think uptime is the main reason to use a cloud provider. For me, the main reason is the ease to expand. You can add and remove infrastructure quite easily. If course, you can do the same in a datacenter, but in my experience it takes planning ahead a bit more than you need with a cloud provider.
Supermancho 7y ago
> It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. The myopia comes from experience. Startups (which aren't solely B2B Healthcare) are more often doomed by lack of customers than by other factors.
- ci5er 7y ago
  I've never understood B2C. Why would anyone go to the trouble of starting a company without $1M in ARR commitments? To me, that sounds like a death wish, but it worked for all the new high-tech consumer facing companies we read about every day!
aflag 7y ago
The elastic cache sla is 99.9%. That's roughly 43 minutes per month. Do you think that's that hard to achieve given the tools we have today?
adrianmsmith 7y ago
Right, but at least where I work (Austria/Germany) if a healthcare provider is outsourcing their data to you, they won't allow you to use AWS anyway (data has to be on your servers, in the same country, run by a company owned in that same country). So even if you are in the situation where you have to worry about uptime, AWS isn't a solution.
- alexeldeib 7y ago
  AWS and Azure both partner with local companies to meet the data residency/sovereignty requirements, IDK about healthcare regulation though.

taylorwc 7y ago

My point is not that 100% uptime was a tectonic shift; it's that the ability to enter a credit card and click deploy is a tectonic shift.

jeswin 7y ago
This was doable well before the advent of what we call now as the "cloud". My first company hosted the product on a shared hosting server, this was back in 1999. Availability was immediate once you paid. Since the early 2000s, dedicated servers were often available within an hour of payment. VM-based hosting took only minutes to get started with. Credit cards were the usual mode of payment, but PayPal was also quite popular. What I'm saying is that cloud hasn't dramatically changed life for startups in their earliest phase of existence.
- ci5er 7y ago
  For monolithic web apps, this is almost certainly true (in my experience), but the ability to rapidly turn d/c configurations, and instantly scale to match spot demand has been a game changer (for me)