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120K seed money is still quite a lot - I wonder if this is typical for a F&F round. How did you determine what your funding goal was? ps - thanks for the post

120K seed money is still quite a lot - I wonder if this is typical for a F&F round. How did you determine what your funding goal was? ps - thanks for the post - 'from the trenches' insights like these are really valuable. pps - members of your founding team also created the BASIC Stamp? Neat!

deleted 18y ago
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ezmobius 18y ago
Well we were starting a new clustered, virtualized hosting environment so we had hard cash needs to get our first set of servers and equipment and data center space. So it's a little different then starting a software company without the same hard costs. We basically built something like ec2 but with more advanced features like load balancing and clustered, posix compliant filesystems. And we shipped before ec2 came out or was even known about publicly. This kind of system costs $$ to do right so the 120k went mostly to hardware and data center costs to bootstrap us to the point where we could take customers. We started planning in february of 2006 and shipped in september 2006 and it's been a wild ride since then. ps - sure, no problem. Let me know if anyone has any other questions. pps - yeah one of our founders started Parallax who made the BASIC stamp.
- richcollins 18y ago
  How did the founders pay their personal bills before the company was profitable?
  - ezmobius 18y ago
    We leached off of quality humans inc, which was a rails consulting shop some of our founders ran and also used savings and personal credit to get through the first 6 months or so after we all quit our day jobs ;) But lots of the planning stages, from Feb06 to August06 happened while I still had a full time day job somewhere else.
jon_dahl 18y ago
$120K is a lot for a YC-style startup (ramen noodles, web app, and no non-founder employees), but isn't isn't unusual in the larger world. Our seed funding was similar to that, and was basically a F&F round. And for a hosting company, I'm impressed that Engineyard was able to get going and get profitable on $120K.
- comatose_kid 18y ago
  I could have probably worded that better - I just meant it was a lot of money to raise from friends and family.

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ezmobius 18y ago

Well we were starting a new clustered, virtualized hosting environment so we had hard cash needs to get our first set of servers and equipment and data center space. So it's a little different then starting a software company without the same hard costs. We basically built something like ec2 but with more advanced features like load balancing and clustered, posix compliant filesystems. And we shipped before ec2 came out or was even known about publicly. This kind of system costs $$ to do right so the 120k went mostly to hardware and data center costs to bootstrap us to the point where we could take customers. We started planning in february of 2006 and shipped in september 2006 and it's been a wild ride since then. ps - sure, no problem. Let me know if anyone has any other questions. pps - yeah one of our founders started Parallax who made the BASIC stamp.

richcollins 18y ago
How did the founders pay their personal bills before the company was profitable?
- ezmobius 18y ago
  We leached off of quality humans inc, which was a rails consulting shop some of our founders ran and also used savings and personal credit to get through the first 6 months or so after we all quit our day jobs ;) But lots of the planning stages, from Feb06 to August06 happened while I still had a full time day job somewhere else.

jon_dahl 18y ago

$120K is a lot for a YC-style startup (ramen noodles, web app, and no non-founder employees), but isn't isn't unusual in the larger world. Our seed funding was similar to that, and was basically a F&F round. And for a hosting company, I'm impressed that Engineyard was able to get going and get profitable on $120K.

comatose_kid 18y ago
I could have probably worded that better - I just meant it was a lot of money to raise from friends and family.