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Did they miss their window? Would this business make more sense during the 2001 dot-com craze? Are startups currently afraid to go with anyone who isn't AWS/GCE

Did they miss their window? Would this business make more sense during the 2001 dot-com craze? Are startups currently afraid to go with anyone who isn't AWS/GCE/Azure because they understand the cost of moving platforms is high?

loldigitalocean 7y ago
No. Compare Linode and DigitalOcean. Linode bootstrapped, took very few financial instruments to aid the journey, had a few missteps along the way, completely reinvented the entire business more than once, and still serves a niche that makes them a successful (and profitable, as in real profitable, not imaginary profitable) company. Their margins are quite good. Slicehost had a solid business when Rackspace bought them, too, despite Rackspace subsequently burying that business in their wandering-through-tech mass grave. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, took a Sand Hill approach and is throwing money at becoming an AWS unicorn without realizing they are never going to be AWS. Read this carefully, DO: you will never, ever, ever be AWS. Full stop. You are not in the conversation, nor is Linode, nor is prgmr (but lsc knows that), nor is Vultr, and so on, and so on. Ask IBM about trying to take on AWS. DigitalOcean is an incredible waste of capital and appears almost as if they didn’t bother to look at Linode’s story at all. The companies are nearly identical behind the scenes and are pursuing the exact same addressable market, but one is a VC darling intent on burning capital on a completely solved problem and therefore gets VC ecosystem attention and expands to fill that attention. Seriously, you can address this market with Excel and some Python scripts; I exaggerate, but not much. The amount of money DigitalOcean spends given my intimate familiarity with the problem space has been baffling to me for the last decade. DigitalOcean should buy Linode with this debt so the Linode people can come in and fire the right people at DO and shed about seven hundred pounds of weight. When, not if, when DigitalOcean collapses, Linode will continue on and enjoy a sudden inflow of DO’s market share. Linode long predates DO and will postdate them, too. I have a poor opinion of Linode in a lot of ways, by the way, so.
- raiyu 7y ago
  Our original business was bootstrapped with no outside investment so we know that growth model very well. In fact that bootstrapping allowed us to build DigitalOcean when no VCs were interested in funding us by self-funding through the profits from our original business. The problem with the approach you detailed is that it is based on growth rate. If you have more customers coming to you than you have cash on hand to buy servers, you will be forced to turn customers away. So if you are growing rapidly you will need outside investment, whether equity or debt, in order to grow the business. In our case we raised equity that helped us to secure additional debt terms and also due to our high growth after product market fit we also needed additional cash to continue to build out our operations. I'm a fan of bootstrapping businesses and not raising outside capital unless it is necessary, but in our case the choice was to raise capital or turn away customers.
  - loldigitalocean 7y ago
    I’ll reiterate the margins. Based on your account, my suspicion is only reinforced, actually: if you had big enough capacity problems to need a $3 million round to buy gear at the size you were in 2013, I’m mystified that your margins were that low. Was that the $10/month decision biting you (notice Linode waited) or the far bigger headcount? How far Linode got on basically two technical employees, including the founder driving gear to the datacenter in the back of his Ridgeline, would seemingly surprise you, as would when the revenue was sufficient to sustain ongoing server spend. Linode ran out of capacity ALL THE TIME. It’s a HUGE market. Turning away a customer is not fatal in the slightest. One server, three months, paid off. Two months profit, next server. Linode leased in the beginning! I’m not arrogant enough to assume I could do it better, but I do know the technical side very well, and with an American Express and a decent funnel of people you know you can be profitable in under a year at this. The fundamentals of what is basically a rack-and-stack game, and what is possible with $400 million of capital... it just doesn’t align with how I’d expect a VPS provider to operate, but you’ve convinced the checkbooks to keep it going, I guess. I actually compare DO and Linode’s approach all the time as an example of VC methodology versus patience. The $400 million raise game is not appropriate for the VPS space. It’s a market literally defined by bootstrappers. If you hit $1 billion ARR in that market, by the way, I’ll shut up. Knowing what I know about the market, that sounds about as likely as DigitalOcean colonizing Mars, but I’ll applaud you if you do it.
- walrus01 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you on your premise that AWS has an entirely different, and much larger size and scale than DO. And has a competitive advantage due to that. But your comment also seems to make the assumption that everybody should be content to let AWS (or Azure, etc, entities with very deep pockets) become a literal monopoly, and everybody should be totally fine with that.
  - loldigitalocean 7y ago
    Nope. I didn’t say anything like that at all. You just don’t best AWS by trying to replicate them, since they have enough capital to create four of you several times a year (and do, i.e., Lightsail).
    - baybal2 7y ago
      Saying that, they themselves really need to look at Baidu, or Alibaba. In the approach of "throwing money on the problem until it works" few can beat them. Alibaba's losses were surreal when they tried to get even to the tenth of AWS scale, but they went way further, and now they are profitable.
      - walrus01 7y ago
        Alibaba and Baidu have a totally other market segment, which is domestic Chinese companies that want and need to be fully compatible with Chinese law for domestic data hosting, retention, government compliance. There is a venn diagram overlap between the markets addressed by the (AWS, Azure, DO, etc) and the Chinese virtual machine providers, but it's nowhere near 100%.
        baybal2 7y ago
        No, they have tons of business outside of China, just take 5 minutes to google that. People can of course challenge their bookkeeping, but still...
        7y ago
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  You may be right but it's hard to take throwaway accounts seriously.
  - loldigitalocean 7y ago
    Fine, ask lsc. I have tremendous respect for Luke given that he had, thanklessly and for years, tried to compete in this exact market singlehandedly. Even competing against him at Linode, that was remarkable to me. I have receipts for my Linode employment and I am unconcerned about the veracity of my analysis (I’m actually paid for said analysis IRL). Think about that bar you’ve set for a minute: “this person doesn’t actively court a reputation on Hacker News, therefore the information is suspect.” If that sounds good to you, we are unlikely to agree on anything, and I’ve little interest in defending my methods to someone who values speaker over spoken. I have other gripes with Linode, but it’s not exactly par for a ‘disgruntled’ former to speak positively about a business, no?
    - thanksthrowaway 7y ago
      Thanks for whatever you contributed to at Linode <3
- wu_187 7y ago
  Linode tried to hide the fact they were compromised multiple times. I don't trust anything they say.
- ksec 7y ago
  >realizing they are never going to be AWS I mean not real AWS, but I think there is a market between, say good old VPS ( which is what DO and Linode are before everyone are "Cloud" ) and AWS. Managed solution like Database, Object Storage, Backup, Simple CDN. Which is certainly what DO AND Linode are going into. There is another trend I spotted, good old Bare Metal is coming back. Useful for base load.
icedchai 7y ago
I think it's really two different markets. DO is for lower end sites that need little more than a VPS or two.
capableweb 7y ago
No, most startups using either AWS or GCE (at least in the market I'm around in, Europe-based) is choosing them because they are giving away free credits and you can usually run the first year for free before starting to think about costs, and at that point you've reached market validation and can afford start thinking about costs.
mr_toad 7y ago
> during the 2001 dot-com craze? The x86 virtualisation tech just wasn’t up to it back then.

loldigitalocean 7y ago

No. Compare Linode and DigitalOcean. Linode bootstrapped, took very few financial instruments to aid the journey, had a few missteps along the way, completely reinvented the entire business more than once, and still serves a niche that makes them a successful (and profitable, as in real profitable, not imaginary profitable) company. Their margins are quite good. Slicehost had a solid business when Rackspace bought them, too, despite Rackspace subsequently burying that business in their wandering-through-tech mass grave. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, took a Sand Hill approach and is throwing money at becoming an AWS unicorn without realizing they are never going to be AWS. Read this carefully, DO: you will never, ever, ever be AWS. Full stop. You are not in the conversation, nor is Linode, nor is prgmr (but lsc knows that), nor is Vultr, and so on, and so on. Ask IBM about trying to take on AWS. DigitalOcean is an incredible waste of capital and appears almost as if they didn’t bother to look at Linode’s story at all. The companies are nearly identical behind the scenes and are pursuing the exact same addressable market, but one is a VC darling intent on burning capital on a completely solved problem and therefore gets VC ecosystem attention and expands to fill that attention. Seriously, you can address this market with Excel and some Python scripts; I exaggerate, but not much. The amount of money DigitalOcean spends given my intimate familiarity with the problem space has been baffling to me for the last decade. DigitalOcean should buy Linode with this debt so the Linode people can come in and fire the right people at DO and shed about seven hundred pounds of weight. When, not if, when DigitalOcean collapses, Linode will continue on and enjoy a sudden inflow of DO’s market share. Linode long predates DO and will postdate them, too. I have a poor opinion of Linode in a lot of ways, by the way, so.

raiyu 7y ago
Our original business was bootstrapped with no outside investment so we know that growth model very well. In fact that bootstrapping allowed us to build DigitalOcean when no VCs were interested in funding us by self-funding through the profits from our original business. The problem with the approach you detailed is that it is based on growth rate. If you have more customers coming to you than you have cash on hand to buy servers, you will be forced to turn customers away. So if you are growing rapidly you will need outside investment, whether equity or debt, in order to grow the business. In our case we raised equity that helped us to secure additional debt terms and also due to our high growth after product market fit we also needed additional cash to continue to build out our operations. I'm a fan of bootstrapping businesses and not raising outside capital unless it is necessary, but in our case the choice was to raise capital or turn away customers.
- loldigitalocean 7y ago
  I’ll reiterate the margins. Based on your account, my suspicion is only reinforced, actually: if you had big enough capacity problems to need a $3 million round to buy gear at the size you were in 2013, I’m mystified that your margins were that low. Was that the $10/month decision biting you (notice Linode waited) or the far bigger headcount? How far Linode got on basically two technical employees, including the founder driving gear to the datacenter in the back of his Ridgeline, would seemingly surprise you, as would when the revenue was sufficient to sustain ongoing server spend. Linode ran out of capacity ALL THE TIME. It’s a HUGE market. Turning away a customer is not fatal in the slightest. One server, three months, paid off. Two months profit, next server. Linode leased in the beginning! I’m not arrogant enough to assume I could do it better, but I do know the technical side very well, and with an American Express and a decent funnel of people you know you can be profitable in under a year at this. The fundamentals of what is basically a rack-and-stack game, and what is possible with $400 million of capital... it just doesn’t align with how I’d expect a VPS provider to operate, but you’ve convinced the checkbooks to keep it going, I guess. I actually compare DO and Linode’s approach all the time as an example of VC methodology versus patience. The $400 million raise game is not appropriate for the VPS space. It’s a market literally defined by bootstrappers. If you hit $1 billion ARR in that market, by the way, I’ll shut up. Knowing what I know about the market, that sounds about as likely as DigitalOcean colonizing Mars, but I’ll applaud you if you do it.
walrus01 7y ago
I don't disagree with you on your premise that AWS has an entirely different, and much larger size and scale than DO. And has a competitive advantage due to that. But your comment also seems to make the assumption that everybody should be content to let AWS (or Azure, etc, entities with very deep pockets) become a literal monopoly, and everybody should be totally fine with that.
- loldigitalocean 7y ago
  Nope. I didn’t say anything like that at all. You just don’t best AWS by trying to replicate them, since they have enough capital to create four of you several times a year (and do, i.e., Lightsail).
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Saying that, they themselves really need to look at Baidu, or Alibaba. In the approach of "throwing money on the problem until it works" few can beat them. Alibaba's losses were surreal when they tried to get even to the tenth of AWS scale, but they went way further, and now they are profitable.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      Alibaba and Baidu have a totally other market segment, which is domestic Chinese companies that want and need to be fully compatible with Chinese law for domestic data hosting, retention, government compliance. There is a venn diagram overlap between the markets addressed by the (AWS, Azure, DO, etc) and the Chinese virtual machine providers, but it's nowhere near 100%.
      - baybal2 7y ago
        No, they have tons of business outside of China, just take 5 minutes to google that. People can of course challenge their bookkeeping, but still...
        7y ago
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
You may be right but it's hard to take throwaway accounts seriously.
- loldigitalocean 7y ago
  Fine, ask lsc. I have tremendous respect for Luke given that he had, thanklessly and for years, tried to compete in this exact market singlehandedly. Even competing against him at Linode, that was remarkable to me. I have receipts for my Linode employment and I am unconcerned about the veracity of my analysis (I’m actually paid for said analysis IRL). Think about that bar you’ve set for a minute: “this person doesn’t actively court a reputation on Hacker News, therefore the information is suspect.” If that sounds good to you, we are unlikely to agree on anything, and I’ve little interest in defending my methods to someone who values speaker over spoken. I have other gripes with Linode, but it’s not exactly par for a ‘disgruntled’ former to speak positively about a business, no?
  - thanksthrowaway 7y ago
    Thanks for whatever you contributed to at Linode <3
wu_187 7y ago
Linode tried to hide the fact they were compromised multiple times. I don't trust anything they say.
ksec 7y ago
>realizing they are never going to be AWS I mean not real AWS, but I think there is a market between, say good old VPS ( which is what DO and Linode are before everyone are "Cloud" ) and AWS. Managed solution like Database, Object Storage, Backup, Simple CDN. Which is certainly what DO AND Linode are going into. There is another trend I spotted, good old Bare Metal is coming back. Useful for base load.

icedchai 7y ago

I think it's really two different markets. DO is for lower end sites that need little more than a VPS or two.

capableweb 7y ago

No, most startups using either AWS or GCE (at least in the market I'm around in, Europe-based) is choosing them because they are giving away free credits and you can usually run the first year for free before starting to think about costs, and at that point you've reached market validation and can afford start thinking about costs.

mr_toad 7y ago

> during the 2001 dot-com craze? The x86 virtualisation tech just wasn’t up to it back then.