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I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup. It's focus is entirely on t

I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup. It's focus is entirely on the personalities involved and not at all on the product. They talk about their cool new office, funding, they have a 50 point list on values, they have a podcast, a newsletter... Yet there's essentially nothing about what the product is (that being the only thing most people care about). This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. Worry about the product first, last and in-between. The rest is just there to signal to us that your priorities aren't in the right place.

jacquesm 7y ago
Remember 'Color'?
- CPLX 7y ago
  Yes. Priceless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
- thomasjudge 7y ago
  Wow, that was eight years ago...
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  "Color Labs, Inc. was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California. Its main product was the eponymous mobile app for sharing photos through social networking. It allowed people to take photos in addition to viewing other photos also taken in the vicinity." I wouldn't compare the venture in question at all to 'Color'...
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You're missing the point. The only reason Color is even known is because its principal had name recognition before the venture was started.
wila 7y ago
Perhaps they do, but they are not ready to share it with the world yet? It's baby steps all the way at this phase.
sdan 7y ago
Agreed. I was somewhat confused on why they had more focus on their Podcast than telling me it was an AWS for startups/people. Maybe sometime in the future when I have time I can go through these long-form types of content, but they say nothing about what they're building on their landing page/don't describe in the level of detail I'm assuming they have in their podcasts. Similar to what you're saying, it's like buying the swag for a company that doesn't exist.
sacheendra 7y ago
It seems like they plan to do hardware-software co-design. Devices (servers, switches?) and firmware designed specifically for their software stack. A software stack (drivers, OS) designed specifically for their hardware. Really interested in seeing where this goes.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  "Hey look we have this cool solution" -> "Hey look we have a few small to middle tier customers" -> "Hey look we have a big customer" -> "Hey look our big customer bought our company". It's the silicon valley startup shuffle...
  - darkwater 7y ago
    But if you have fun and make money in the process, what's wrong with it? Companies are not (or should not) be like children.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  They're apparently doing hardware-software co-design for rack-scale servers, integrating some kind of state-of-the-art systems-management features of the sort that "cloud" suppliers like AWS are assumed to be relying on for their offerings. Kinda interesting ofc, but how many enterprises actually need something like this? If there was an actual perceived need for datacenter equipment to be designed (and hardware-software co-designed) on the "rack scale", we would probably be doing it right and running mainframe hardware for everything.
  - spamizbad 7y ago
    It starts looking appealing when your monthly AWS bill is deep into the 5 figures and you’re kinda trapped: do you pour your engineering resources into cost-optimizing your infrastructure (doable, but time consuming) or kick the can down the road? Believe it or not, going private but not having to give up the niceties of AWS or Azure would be quite appealing.
empath75 7y ago
They’re not selling you anything, they’re raising money. I’m sure investors are getting the details after signing NDAs.
- oplav 7y ago
  I was under the impression that potential investors usually don't sign NDAs.
  - edoceo 7y ago
    Correct. Or rather, I've never seen it. Some are even offended when asked. N=~150
  - bretpiatt 7y ago
    Investors do not often sign NDAs covering "ideas", they will sign (and will often ask you to sign) NDAs with scope limited to investment terms and due diligence information.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Probably depends on how much leverage those seeking funding have.
- zelon88 7y ago
  They're converting Twitter fame into capital funding. Not having a product means you technically don't have an obligation to deliver anything in return for that capital.
ben_jones 7y ago
According to other comments on this thread all three of the names mentioned are already highly successful and financially independent individuals. I wonder if the high risk tolerance encourages them to focus more on the lifestyle aspects of this project (and if that is a trend we see in other startups founded by already successful individuals). There is also something about well-off individuals taking investment money to get a fancy office rather then bootstrapping and keeping all the equity/destiny of the company themselves that smells funny to me. I guess its "free money" but I have to wonder if the products would be better if it was sweat equity instead.
- ta999999171 7y ago
  Who tries harder - pro sportsballer with the check in the bank, or the first-year college player?
  - baumy 7y ago
    The pro sportsballer, hands down. His superior work ethic is likely a big part of why he made the pros, and 99% of first-year college players won't.
  - ben_jones 7y ago
    The average NBA career is about 4.5 years
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Why so short its not a full on contact spot like NFL or Rugby
- dunkelheit 7y ago
  Considering that apparently they will try to do something on the hardware side, additional capital may be necessary. Just guessing.
- plange 7y ago
  They are starting in a garage https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/ Read up before you make unfounded claims
djhaskin987 7y ago
Contrast this with the website of CoreOS when they were in start up mode. It was all about their product and why it would change the world. CoreOS was perhaps the best startup of the decade in my opinion. https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com...
- ianai 7y ago
  Haven’t followed CoreOS, but it joined red hat. Does that comport with your view of it?
  - parsimo2010 7y ago
    It means they had a successful exit from/transition out of "startup" status and joined a company with decades of Linux development experience.
    - ianai 7y ago
      So it’s not red hat scooping up competition in the startup phase? Like my Econ background expects.
      - wnoise 7y ago
        Both/And
      - srmatto 7y ago
        Red Hat is absorbing some of their technology rather than just firing everyone and terminating the product like Travis CI for example.
      - robszumski 7y ago
        Early CoreOS employee here. CoreOS technology forms the basis of Red Hat's OpenShift 4. It was definitely a product driven acquisition, not any attempt to kill competition.
rainyMammoth 7y ago
Exactly. They are trying to cash out their Twitter fame. This company is essentially a personality cult at this point. It might turn out wonderful and I'm excited to see what the product will eventually be.
- kick 7y ago
  Twitter fame? That's like saying Carmack was just trying to cash out his Facebook fame. Cantrill and Frazelle both have created software used by millions.
  - bravoetch 7y ago
    That's the point. It doesn't matter what they did previously or who they are. The current product can only be judged on it's merits.
    - tw04 7y ago
      It absolutely does matter... someone with a track record of success will and deserves to get the benefit of the doubt when starting something new compared to someone with a poor track record or no record at all.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Its a biased population? Self-selecting? A track record may be 'somebody who was at the right place at the right time'. A track record of winning the lottery, for instance, doesn't mean squat. A track record means, at bottom, that they had no disqualifying traits.
        tw04 7y ago
        Ironic you should pick winning the lottery, because it absolutely DOES mean squat. For instance, the only person I'm aware of with a "track record" of winning the lottery had a system to consistently win the lottery. Had you given your money to him you'd be rich. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-error-in-lottery-made-27-million-playing-over-over-for-55-weeks.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-...
zelon88 7y ago
I agree. All I see here are developers with huge Twitter followings pitching themselves for capital funding with ideals as the product.
- api 7y ago
  There are plenty of investors who think just having a large Twitter following is reason enough to invest.
- x0x0 7y ago
  I dunno what your problem with these people is, but Jessie is a Docker maintainer and Bryan built dtrace and went on to do fascinating things with illumos and Joyent. Steve Tuck spent 10 years at Joyent, starting as a Sales Director and ending as President. These are all serious people, and the first two have reputations built on strong technical contributions to (even ignoring the wild overuse of k8s for resume-driven-development) complex technical products.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    I wish it said this on their “about the team” page.
jmartrican 7y ago
Agreed. I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in. The company currently manages thousands of hosts and the cloud is eating into their profits. The hardware out there is way to expensive (or a bad job was done searching) to move away from the cloud. If they can provide good hardware that would allow the thousands of host company to save money if they did it on their own, then we would be interested in looking into it. Off the top of my head of what would be required besides just cheap hardware. 1) Cloud like software to manage it or k8s native support. I don't know exactly how that would be done, but the administrative costs of using this hardware can't be so high as to make the cloud a more viable option. 2) Some options for network access. Cloud does not just provide VM's but the underlying reliable network with multiple redundant pipes. Comcast Internet access might be good enough, but some customers might require large redundant pipes. While they might NOT need to solve this themselves, they should make sure that the market does provide solutions that when taken into account, allows for cheaper than cloud solutions. 3) Physical location... same as item 2 but for physical location of the hardware. I remember back in the day managing colos. It really sucked. It was not just hardware costs that sucked. They should just consider that.
- ianai 7y ago
  Some pretty good points there! Can you think of systematic ways to make colo not suck to operate?
- Accujack 7y ago
  > I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in. This is exactly how any "WeWork" type company sucks in investors. You'd just ignore the stupid out of hand except that it would be so nice to believe that if this company is on the level and IF their product does what they say it will and IF they deliver it in a reasonable time frame then it will solve the problem and somehow make money for investors. Forget the names and reputations of the people involved... if three random people came up to you at a conference and said "We've formed a company to solve problem X!", wouldn't you wait until they showed an actual product to even think about potentially making decisions based on what they might do?
deskamess 7y ago
This was in one of the blogs: "...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever." I think that's a good summary description. In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > "a true cloud-like on-prem experience" I'm afraid what people mean by that statement and what the startup is going to try to do are completely different things. As in people mean AWS-like cloud services running on multiple servers they control with all the fault tolerance and geographically distributed. But for the startup it probably means cloud services running on expensive servers in a fast local network.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  Does that mean "I have servers... Oxide manages the virtualization"? Or "I bought a rack full of Oxide and now I have my own puddle of elastic compute on-premises." (If you condense a small cloud, you get a puddle, I presume.) If hardware is involved it would seem like the latter. In which case they'll be competing with Amazon's on-premises solution and commodity hardware.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      So, like AWS Nitro?
deleted 7y ago
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inkaudio 7y ago
They focus on the team because that’s the how startups raise money these days, investors figure they could always pivot to something else. Obviously this can be problematic especially when the founder(s) is good at raising money, see Wework
- weej 7y ago
  Fair point "WeWork", but this early on I think the focus of an investor should be more on the founders vs. product/business idea. This early on there's a potential for pivoting, and you'd rather have smart, talented individuals that can deliver vs. a product idea
brudgers 7y ago
Real airports have control towers, baggage handlers, and hangers. Seeing them, it is a mistake to assume no flight operations. To assume it's only a cargo cult. Or to assume, in the age of Kickstarters, that it will never be more than marketing. None of which is my prediction of the company's successful shipping of quality product. Some companies never get past the low hanging fruit. Other companies do.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  Airports also have flights going in and out, so you can see that they are operating.
rakefire 7y ago
I couldn't agree with you more!
mister_hn 7y ago
But the real question is: who are they? I've never heard about them, I don't understand all this hype here
- antoinealb 7y ago
  Jessie was employed by Docker, Bryan was CTO of Joyent and Steve was COO of Joyent. They all did some important contribution to the container ecosystem and they are now starting what appears to be a company selling custom cloud hardware.
  - jonny_eh 7y ago
    > custom cloud hardware Uhh, you mean computers?
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      Looking at their pedigree, I'd hazard that the computers are geared towards running containerized workloads, so "custom cloud hardware" sounds about right.
      - codeflo 7y ago
        That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? There's nothing all that special about running containers at the hardware level, they are really just groups of processes that the kernel manages a certain way.
        hector_vasquez 7y ago
        People who worked at Docker, Joyent, and Sun would be the ones to answer your question :). Consider the possibility that the kernel and the h/w are increasingly at odds on commodity server hardware.
        sangnoir 7y ago
        > That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? It appears their start-up exists to answer this question. I strongly doubt their mission is "compete with Supermicro & Taiwanese ODMs on general-purpose computers"
rmason 7y ago
They must have defined the problem that they're trying to solve if they convinced an investor to fund their company right? If they want to build any interest in what they're doing it you'd think they'd share it. But no we hear how excited they are and their fifty points defining what company they want to be. If the company's product is top secret then why share anything at all?
- mbesto 7y ago
  Not necessarily. If you ask most investors, they usually will boil down an early-stage investment to "I invested in this team".
0x0aff374668 7y ago
> This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. I worked for such a CEO. In the first year we had four week-long retreats to: an island in WA state, Palm springs, Austin, and Banff (that's where the stats team was). TONS of swag. Aeron chairs. New MBPros. Oh, and champagne fridays. Needless to say it burned through it's good will seed round in 1 year, and the CEO begged for another year's worth of money from friends before shuttering. But hey, hype sells in the software world.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  Chairs and laptops are fine. Even nice ones. They aren’t what brings down a tech startup. These purchases can speak to the mentality of the founders, but they are also nice all around for quality of life. We spend a lot of time on laptops, sitting in those chairs. The chairs last a long time and hold their value well. Worth every penny. The Trips are kind of telling, though. We are a small consulting firm and have nice laptops, chairs, desks, and keyboards. Those things aren’t the problem :)
  - ivl 7y ago
    Got to agree here. The idea of a company not providing decent hardware and chairs says a lot. It's a couple thousand per employee at most, for an easy gain in employee satisfaction. Trips are pretty silly though.
  - sjburt 7y ago
    Yeah, the red flag in a startup is a founding team who can't explain in a sentence what their product is or why it's different. So far I've read 3 blogs and 4 websites and all I can tell is that they have a garage and also maybe an office.
    - ssully 7y ago
      Their homepage is pretty clear - they are trying to make cloud technologies more accessible in on premises solutions. I am not an expert in the field, but I work at a place that is very resistant to cloud solutions for certain applications, and getting the same stuff working on prem can be difficult and pricey.
VoodooJuJu 7y ago
Reminds me of the top comment from PragmaticPulp in another HN thread [1], where Pragmatic realized the personality very much is the product: I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives. However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype. I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories. Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are. [1] The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle | Hacker News. (2019, December 02). Retrieved from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523
mikkergp 7y ago
A thing I'm curious about is how they plan on handling the supply chain. As a consumer of server products I observe that running a server company is much less a technical problem and much more of a supply chain management problem. As I understand it, it is one of the many reasons why Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. That being said, I wonder if the forcing factor behind building their own servers for the big three companies was mostly the inability to get hardware fast enough. Sure, there are tons of other benefits you get after you start building your own servers, but I wonder if they would have been pursued if Dell could land servers on time. In this sense, building your own machines is a much smaller scale to try to supply chain your way around, even if you're Google. That and private companies can be much more agile since they don't have to support existing workloads. Hard drive shortage? Change the spec last minute to not rely on them. This is pretty exciting to see, and there are plenty of third party vendors making money in the space, but they seem to want to revolutionize the space, and I'm curious to see how that happens.
paggle 7y ago
Sometimes, though, getting noticed is the hardest challenge a company can face. In these companies, name brand recognition is worth more than a billion dollars of funding. Kylie Cosmetics is just one example.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  I think this is more true in the consumer space. If you're asking me to build a business on your product, I'm going to bolt at the first sign of flakiness (of which these vanity blog posts are a big red flag).
mberning 7y ago
It reminds me of that startup where each of the founders gave themselves a goofy title like 'Cheif Cleverberry' or something like that. I wish I could remember the details. I think it was ex-blackberry employees starting a phone company.
- mberning 7y ago
  Here’s a link for all you haters https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1128246/tivo-buys-super-secret-strangeberry https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1128246/tivo-buys-s...
deleted 7y ago
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tyingq 7y ago
There is one post that's marginally helpful: https://sysmgr.org/blog/2019/12/02/a-new-machine/ https://sysmgr.org/blog/2019/12/02/a-new-machine/ My guess is they want to sell servers with a first class control plane. Something much less clunky than what's currently possible to cobble together with IPMI, PXE, Intel ME, grub, etc. Similar to what AWS, GCP, etc, use internally. And maybe expanding into routers based on these servers, also with a control plane, etc. I'm extrapolating a lot out of little though. They are very vague.
deleted 7y ago
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gfosco 7y ago
This was the top comment by a long shot and is all of a sudden way down the bottom... hmmmmmm.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  It's one of my highest upvoted comments ever with 250 points. Not sure why it dropped to the bottom so fast.
  - gfosco 7y ago
    It immediately went from #1 to like #15 behind comments that obviously do not have a lot of votes. Take a guess why. HN fuckery afoot as usual.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
      It's just more signal not to use whatever they end up producing. Whether it was an astroturf campaign or they used personal connections to get HN to re-rank things, it doesn't speak well to transparency, honesty or being customer-centric. I think my original comment was a very valid criticism of vaporware and vanity blog posts used in lieu of actual product information. Trying to sweep that under the rug is not a good look.
    - mkl 7y ago
      There's a strong recency component to the comment ordering. New comments get a boost so they are visible enough to get upvotes if they deserve them, and over time the order settles.
    - dang 7y ago
      We downweight bilious comments, especially at the top of threads. Why? Because the internet tendency is to make everything ill-tempered, peevish, and gross. The spirit of this site is curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and for that to have breathing space, there needs to be an active counterweight. The main thing to understand is that it's a global optimization, not something stupid like supporting particular PR campaigns.
_pius 7y ago
”I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup .... they [list their values] ... yet there’s essentially nothing about what the product is.” Imagine you and your friends excitedly announcing on your personal homepages that you are setting out to build your passion project into a going concern “not driven by power or greed, but by accomplishment and self-fulfillment” [1] and being flooded in a community of supposed hackers with derision that your post wasn’t a good enough press release. For some people, the actual human excitement of friends earnestly getting together to build something new primarily because they want to see it in the world is so foreign that they can only snark about it. Hopefully that kind of response vindicates their values more than it demoralizes. [1]: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-with-soul/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-wi...
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Vaporware has been looked down upon in our industry for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Plenty of teams that seem good end up producing nothing. Announcements like this are a huge red flag to people who have seen this pattern many times over.
  - _pius 7y ago
    Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project. In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
      Well, if they want me to build a business on their product then yes, they owe me an explanation as to why I'd do such a thing. As this announcement stands, I wouldn't trust them to focus on the customer first and hence won't be using what they build.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 7y ago

Remember 'Color'?

CPLX 7y ago
Yes. Priceless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
thomasjudge 7y ago
Wow, that was eight years ago...
ErikAugust 7y ago
"Color Labs, Inc. was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California. Its main product was the eponymous mobile app for sharing photos through social networking. It allowed people to take photos in addition to viewing other photos also taken in the vicinity." I wouldn't compare the venture in question at all to 'Color'...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You're missing the point. The only reason Color is even known is because its principal had name recognition before the venture was started.

wila 7y ago

Perhaps they do, but they are not ready to share it with the world yet? It's baby steps all the way at this phase.

sdan 7y ago

Agreed. I was somewhat confused on why they had more focus on their Podcast than telling me it was an AWS for startups/people. Maybe sometime in the future when I have time I can go through these long-form types of content, but they say nothing about what they're building on their landing page/don't describe in the level of detail I'm assuming they have in their podcasts. Similar to what you're saying, it's like buying the swag for a company that doesn't exist.

sacheendra 7y ago

It seems like they plan to do hardware-software co-design. Devices (servers, switches?) and firmware designed specifically for their software stack. A software stack (drivers, OS) designed specifically for their hardware. Really interested in seeing where this goes.

peterwwillis 7y ago
"Hey look we have this cool solution" -> "Hey look we have a few small to middle tier customers" -> "Hey look we have a big customer" -> "Hey look our big customer bought our company". It's the silicon valley startup shuffle...
- darkwater 7y ago
  But if you have fun and make money in the process, what's wrong with it? Companies are not (or should not) be like children.
zozbot234 7y ago
They're apparently doing hardware-software co-design for rack-scale servers, integrating some kind of state-of-the-art systems-management features of the sort that "cloud" suppliers like AWS are assumed to be relying on for their offerings. Kinda interesting ofc, but how many enterprises actually need something like this? If there was an actual perceived need for datacenter equipment to be designed (and hardware-software co-designed) on the "rack scale", we would probably be doing it right and running mainframe hardware for everything.
- spamizbad 7y ago
  It starts looking appealing when your monthly AWS bill is deep into the 5 figures and you’re kinda trapped: do you pour your engineering resources into cost-optimizing your infrastructure (doable, but time consuming) or kick the can down the road? Believe it or not, going private but not having to give up the niceties of AWS or Azure would be quite appealing.

empath75 7y ago

They’re not selling you anything, they’re raising money. I’m sure investors are getting the details after signing NDAs.

oplav 7y ago
I was under the impression that potential investors usually don't sign NDAs.
- edoceo 7y ago
  Correct. Or rather, I've never seen it. Some are even offended when asked. N=~150
- bretpiatt 7y ago
  Investors do not often sign NDAs covering "ideas", they will sign (and will often ask you to sign) NDAs with scope limited to investment terms and due diligence information.
- empath75 7y ago
  Probably depends on how much leverage those seeking funding have.
zelon88 7y ago
They're converting Twitter fame into capital funding. Not having a product means you technically don't have an obligation to deliver anything in return for that capital.

ben_jones 7y ago

According to other comments on this thread all three of the names mentioned are already highly successful and financially independent individuals. I wonder if the high risk tolerance encourages them to focus more on the lifestyle aspects of this project (and if that is a trend we see in other startups founded by already successful individuals). There is also something about well-off individuals taking investment money to get a fancy office rather then bootstrapping and keeping all the equity/destiny of the company themselves that smells funny to me. I guess its "free money" but I have to wonder if the products would be better if it was sweat equity instead.

ta999999171 7y ago
Who tries harder - pro sportsballer with the check in the bank, or the first-year college player?
- baumy 7y ago
  The pro sportsballer, hands down. His superior work ethic is likely a big part of why he made the pros, and 99% of first-year college players won't.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  The average NBA career is about 4.5 years
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Why so short its not a full on contact spot like NFL or Rugby
dunkelheit 7y ago
Considering that apparently they will try to do something on the hardware side, additional capital may be necessary. Just guessing.
plange 7y ago
They are starting in a garage https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/ Read up before you make unfounded claims

djhaskin987 7y ago

Contrast this with the website of CoreOS when they were in start up mode. It was all about their product and why it would change the world. CoreOS was perhaps the best startup of the decade in my opinion. https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com...

ianai 7y ago
Haven’t followed CoreOS, but it joined red hat. Does that comport with your view of it?
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  It means they had a successful exit from/transition out of "startup" status and joined a company with decades of Linux development experience.
  - ianai 7y ago
    So it’s not red hat scooping up competition in the startup phase? Like my Econ background expects.
    - wnoise 7y ago
      Both/And
    - srmatto 7y ago
      Red Hat is absorbing some of their technology rather than just firing everyone and terminating the product like Travis CI for example.
    - robszumski 7y ago
      Early CoreOS employee here. CoreOS technology forms the basis of Red Hat's OpenShift 4. It was definitely a product driven acquisition, not any attempt to kill competition.

rainyMammoth 7y ago

Exactly. They are trying to cash out their Twitter fame. This company is essentially a personality cult at this point. It might turn out wonderful and I'm excited to see what the product will eventually be.

kick 7y ago
Twitter fame? That's like saying Carmack was just trying to cash out his Facebook fame. Cantrill and Frazelle both have created software used by millions.
- bravoetch 7y ago
  That's the point. It doesn't matter what they did previously or who they are. The current product can only be judged on it's merits.
  - tw04 7y ago
    It absolutely does matter... someone with a track record of success will and deserves to get the benefit of the doubt when starting something new compared to someone with a poor track record or no record at all.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Its a biased population? Self-selecting? A track record may be 'somebody who was at the right place at the right time'. A track record of winning the lottery, for instance, doesn't mean squat. A track record means, at bottom, that they had no disqualifying traits.
      - tw04 7y ago
        Ironic you should pick winning the lottery, because it absolutely DOES mean squat. For instance, the only person I'm aware of with a "track record" of winning the lottery had a system to consistently win the lottery. Had you given your money to him you'd be rich. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-error-in-lottery-made-27-million-playing-over-over-for-55-weeks.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-...

zelon88 7y ago

I agree. All I see here are developers with huge Twitter followings pitching themselves for capital funding with ideals as the product.

api 7y ago
There are plenty of investors who think just having a large Twitter following is reason enough to invest.
x0x0 7y ago
I dunno what your problem with these people is, but Jessie is a Docker maintainer and Bryan built dtrace and went on to do fascinating things with illumos and Joyent. Steve Tuck spent 10 years at Joyent, starting as a Sales Director and ending as President. These are all serious people, and the first two have reputations built on strong technical contributions to (even ignoring the wild overuse of k8s for resume-driven-development) complex technical products.
- azinman2 7y ago
  I wish it said this on their “about the team” page.

jmartrican 7y ago

Agreed. I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in. The company currently manages thousands of hosts and the cloud is eating into their profits. The hardware out there is way to expensive (or a bad job was done searching) to move away from the cloud. If they can provide good hardware that would allow the thousands of host company to save money if they did it on their own, then we would be interested in looking into it. Off the top of my head of what would be required besides just cheap hardware. 1) Cloud like software to manage it or k8s native support. I don't know exactly how that would be done, but the administrative costs of using this hardware can't be so high as to make the cloud a more viable option. 2) Some options for network access. Cloud does not just provide VM's but the underlying reliable network with multiple redundant pipes. Comcast Internet access might be good enough, but some customers might require large redundant pipes. While they might NOT need to solve this themselves, they should make sure that the market does provide solutions that when taken into account, allows for cheaper than cloud solutions. 3) Physical location... same as item 2 but for physical location of the hardware. I remember back in the day managing colos. It really sucked. It was not just hardware costs that sucked. They should just consider that.

ianai 7y ago
Some pretty good points there! Can you think of systematic ways to make colo not suck to operate?
Accujack 7y ago
> I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in. This is exactly how any "WeWork" type company sucks in investors. You'd just ignore the stupid out of hand except that it would be so nice to believe that if this company is on the level and IF their product does what they say it will and IF they deliver it in a reasonable time frame then it will solve the problem and somehow make money for investors. Forget the names and reputations of the people involved... if three random people came up to you at a conference and said "We've formed a company to solve problem X!", wouldn't you wait until they showed an actual product to even think about potentially making decisions based on what they might do?

deskamess 7y ago

This was in one of the blogs: "...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever." I think that's a good summary description. In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.

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zzzcpan 7y ago
> "a true cloud-like on-prem experience" I'm afraid what people mean by that statement and what the startup is going to try to do are completely different things. As in people mean AWS-like cloud services running on multiple servers they control with all the fault tolerance and geographically distributed. But for the startup it probably means cloud services running on expensive servers in a fast local network.
slowmovintarget 7y ago
Does that mean "I have servers... Oxide manages the virtualization"? Or "I bought a rack full of Oxide and now I have my own puddle of elastic compute on-premises." (If you condense a small cloud, you get a puddle, I presume.) If hardware is involved it would seem like the latter. In which case they'll be competing with Amazon's on-premises solution and commodity hardware.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    So, like AWS Nitro?

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inkaudio 7y ago

They focus on the team because that’s the how startups raise money these days, investors figure they could always pivot to something else. Obviously this can be problematic especially when the founder(s) is good at raising money, see Wework

weej 7y ago
Fair point "WeWork", but this early on I think the focus of an investor should be more on the founders vs. product/business idea. This early on there's a potential for pivoting, and you'd rather have smart, talented individuals that can deliver vs. a product idea

brudgers 7y ago

Real airports have control towers, baggage handlers, and hangers. Seeing them, it is a mistake to assume no flight operations. To assume it's only a cargo cult. Or to assume, in the age of Kickstarters, that it will never be more than marketing. None of which is my prediction of the company's successful shipping of quality product. Some companies never get past the low hanging fruit. Other companies do.

Finnucane 7y ago
Airports also have flights going in and out, so you can see that they are operating.

rakefire 7y ago

I couldn't agree with you more!

mister_hn 7y ago

But the real question is: who are they? I've never heard about them, I don't understand all this hype here

antoinealb 7y ago
Jessie was employed by Docker, Bryan was CTO of Joyent and Steve was COO of Joyent. They all did some important contribution to the container ecosystem and they are now starting what appears to be a company selling custom cloud hardware.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  > custom cloud hardware Uhh, you mean computers?
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    Looking at their pedigree, I'd hazard that the computers are geared towards running containerized workloads, so "custom cloud hardware" sounds about right.
    - codeflo 7y ago
      That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? There's nothing all that special about running containers at the hardware level, they are really just groups of processes that the kernel manages a certain way.
      - hector_vasquez 7y ago
        People who worked at Docker, Joyent, and Sun would be the ones to answer your question :). Consider the possibility that the kernel and the h/w are increasingly at odds on commodity server hardware.
      - sangnoir 7y ago
        > That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? It appears their start-up exists to answer this question. I strongly doubt their mission is "compete with Supermicro & Taiwanese ODMs on general-purpose computers"

rmason 7y ago

They must have defined the problem that they're trying to solve if they convinced an investor to fund their company right? If they want to build any interest in what they're doing it you'd think they'd share it. But no we hear how excited they are and their fifty points defining what company they want to be. If the company's product is top secret then why share anything at all?

mbesto 7y ago
Not necessarily. If you ask most investors, they usually will boil down an early-stage investment to "I invested in this team".

0x0aff374668 7y ago

> This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. I worked for such a CEO. In the first year we had four week-long retreats to: an island in WA state, Palm springs, Austin, and Banff (that's where the stats team was). TONS of swag. Aeron chairs. New MBPros. Oh, and champagne fridays. Needless to say it burned through it's good will seed round in 1 year, and the CEO begged for another year's worth of money from friends before shuttering. But hey, hype sells in the software world.

bitexploder 7y ago
Chairs and laptops are fine. Even nice ones. They aren’t what brings down a tech startup. These purchases can speak to the mentality of the founders, but they are also nice all around for quality of life. We spend a lot of time on laptops, sitting in those chairs. The chairs last a long time and hold their value well. Worth every penny. The Trips are kind of telling, though. We are a small consulting firm and have nice laptops, chairs, desks, and keyboards. Those things aren’t the problem :)
- ivl 7y ago
  Got to agree here. The idea of a company not providing decent hardware and chairs says a lot. It's a couple thousand per employee at most, for an easy gain in employee satisfaction. Trips are pretty silly though.
- sjburt 7y ago
  Yeah, the red flag in a startup is a founding team who can't explain in a sentence what their product is or why it's different. So far I've read 3 blogs and 4 websites and all I can tell is that they have a garage and also maybe an office.
  - ssully 7y ago
    Their homepage is pretty clear - they are trying to make cloud technologies more accessible in on premises solutions. I am not an expert in the field, but I work at a place that is very resistant to cloud solutions for certain applications, and getting the same stuff working on prem can be difficult and pricey.

VoodooJuJu 7y ago

Reminds me of the top comment from PragmaticPulp in another HN thread [1], where Pragmatic realized the personality very much is the product: I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives. However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype. I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories. Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are. [1] The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle | Hacker News. (2019, December 02). Retrieved from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523

mikkergp 7y ago

A thing I'm curious about is how they plan on handling the supply chain. As a consumer of server products I observe that running a server company is much less a technical problem and much more of a supply chain management problem. As I understand it, it is one of the many reasons why Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. That being said, I wonder if the forcing factor behind building their own servers for the big three companies was mostly the inability to get hardware fast enough. Sure, there are tons of other benefits you get after you start building your own servers, but I wonder if they would have been pursued if Dell could land servers on time. In this sense, building your own machines is a much smaller scale to try to supply chain your way around, even if you're Google. That and private companies can be much more agile since they don't have to support existing workloads. Hard drive shortage? Change the spec last minute to not rely on them. This is pretty exciting to see, and there are plenty of third party vendors making money in the space, but they seem to want to revolutionize the space, and I'm curious to see how that happens.

paggle 7y ago

Sometimes, though, getting noticed is the hardest challenge a company can face. In these companies, name brand recognition is worth more than a billion dollars of funding. Kylie Cosmetics is just one example.

malvosenior 7y ago
I think this is more true in the consumer space. If you're asking me to build a business on your product, I'm going to bolt at the first sign of flakiness (of which these vanity blog posts are a big red flag).

mberning 7y ago

It reminds me of that startup where each of the founders gave themselves a goofy title like 'Cheif Cleverberry' or something like that. I wish I could remember the details. I think it was ex-blackberry employees starting a phone company.

mberning 7y ago
Here’s a link for all you haters https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1128246/tivo-buys-super-secret-strangeberry https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1128246/tivo-buys-s...

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tyingq 7y ago

There is one post that's marginally helpful: https://sysmgr.org/blog/2019/12/02/a-new-machine/ https://sysmgr.org/blog/2019/12/02/a-new-machine/ My guess is they want to sell servers with a first class control plane. Something much less clunky than what's currently possible to cobble together with IPMI, PXE, Intel ME, grub, etc. Similar to what AWS, GCP, etc, use internally. And maybe expanding into routers based on these servers, also with a control plane, etc. I'm extrapolating a lot out of little though. They are very vague.

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gfosco 7y ago

This was the top comment by a long shot and is all of a sudden way down the bottom... hmmmmmm.

malvosenior 7y ago
It's one of my highest upvoted comments ever with 250 points. Not sure why it dropped to the bottom so fast.
- gfosco 7y ago
  It immediately went from #1 to like #15 behind comments that obviously do not have a lot of votes. Take a guess why. HN fuckery afoot as usual.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    It's just more signal not to use whatever they end up producing. Whether it was an astroturf campaign or they used personal connections to get HN to re-rank things, it doesn't speak well to transparency, honesty or being customer-centric. I think my original comment was a very valid criticism of vaporware and vanity blog posts used in lieu of actual product information. Trying to sweep that under the rug is not a good look.
  - mkl 7y ago
    There's a strong recency component to the comment ordering. New comments get a boost so they are visible enough to get upvotes if they deserve them, and over time the order settles.
  - dang 7y ago
    We downweight bilious comments, especially at the top of threads. Why? Because the internet tendency is to make everything ill-tempered, peevish, and gross. The spirit of this site is curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and for that to have breathing space, there needs to be an active counterweight. The main thing to understand is that it's a global optimization, not something stupid like supporting particular PR campaigns.

_pius 7y ago

”I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup .... they [list their values] ... yet there’s essentially nothing about what the product is.” Imagine you and your friends excitedly announcing on your personal homepages that you are setting out to build your passion project into a going concern “not driven by power or greed, but by accomplishment and self-fulfillment” [1] and being flooded in a community of supposed hackers with derision that your post wasn’t a good enough press release. For some people, the actual human excitement of friends earnestly getting together to build something new primarily because they want to see it in the world is so foreign that they can only snark about it. Hopefully that kind of response vindicates their values more than it demoralizes. [1]: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-with-soul/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-wi...

malvosenior 7y ago
Vaporware has been looked down upon in our industry for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Plenty of teams that seem good end up producing nothing. Announcements like this are a huge red flag to people who have seen this pattern many times over.
- _pius 7y ago
  Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project. In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Well, if they want me to build a business on their product then yes, they owe me an explanation as to why I'd do such a thing. As this announcement stands, I wouldn't trust them to focus on the customer first and hence won't be using what they build.

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