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Backblaze IPO

428 points by hippich 5y ago

tester756 5y ago
how much time it takes to write document like that? also that formatting, damn.
- deleted 5y ago
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apple4ever 5y ago
I dropped them for Arq. They kept raising their prices, and their support was bad. Just utterly pissed me off. Arq is cheaper and better (they actually have backup options!)
durnygbur 5y ago
Any chance to subscribe for their shares for an EU tax resident? List of EU based brokers accepting the subscriptions?
- reacharavindh 5y ago
  I am an EU resident, and I use Interactive Brokers to buy US shares. I hope I can buy Backblaze shares when they IPO.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    He wants to be in on the IPO I think, buying when it's reached the stock market is too late for that.
    - durnygbur 5y ago
      yes, this is my intention
      - Trufa 5y ago
        Let me know if you know of anything.
      - reacharavindh 5y ago
        Sorry, I am a newbie to this sort of thing. I only ever buy stocks in the open market for my small portfolio of personal investments. Is it even possible to get shares _before_ an IPO? I thought there were only private investments and shares(after an IPO). One wouldn't call private investments the same as "shares" would they? Even if so, then why is the same bank/financial institution that manages the IPO involved in making a private investment in a company? Wouldn't you need to contact the founders of the company as they are the owners until the IPO?
        durnygbur 5y ago
        In big shortcut - usually there are few banks and institutions involved in the process of the IPO. Some of them offer individual brokerage accounts and let their customers to subscribe to shares pre-IPO at the subscription price.
        reacharavindh 5y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. I thought the SEC filing shows X number of shares being brought to the IPO, which meant they would hit the market at open, but then it never is too simple ;-)
      - masterof0 5y ago
        Are you able to use SoFI? SoFi have a pre-IPO kinda thing, that lets you buy shares "before others".
- odiroot 5y ago
  Wouldn't you need to be a customer of one of the underwriting banks? Or, conversely, one level removed, so a customer of one of the big banks on the "VIP list" of initial buyers. I always thought retail-facing brokers are just too small fishes to be involved.
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    e.g. Degiro enables current share owners to subscribe to new issue of shares in case of dilution, so here is the little hope I have...
busymom0 5y ago
They also released "Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2021" today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082379
kdasme 5y ago
Good luck Backblaze! It is a tough market for sure, especially with recent announcement from Cloudflare.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Didn't know Backblaze offers cloud storage. Cool to know!
  - miked85 5y ago
    Isn't that basically their entire business?
    - yellow_lead 5y ago
      I only knew of them from their consumer business.
- austinpena 5y ago
  I think B2 and R2 target different market segments.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    The store stuff on the internet and the… Wait. What’s the other segment?
    - austinpena 5y ago
      *opinions are mine and not my employers. It depends how you're going to access your data/ compliance needs. B2 per/TB storage is much cheaper than what R2 will be. R2 will enable cross-region availability which can be necessary for many companies choosing to adopt. It's my opinion that R2 targets more the likes of S3/ integrated storage providers rather than just being a "low cost" provider like Wasabi/Storj/B2/etc.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
henning 5y ago
> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!
- airstrike 5y ago
  That's pretty standard for most young and fast growing tech companies
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - AYBABTME 5y ago
    It feels like Backblaze has been in the space for a while though? My uninformed picture of them was as a modest small/medium size business with a good niche product and probably some loyal customers type, not as an all-stop-sign-pulled-VC-funded-moonshot startup.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      I think the deal is they are spending more on growth than their profit, buying hardware for the next several years is expensive and as long as that growth keeps up quite a bit of value is being created.
  - windthrown 5y ago
    At 14 years old, is Backblaze still considered "young"?
    - jstx1 5y ago
      The less successful you are, the longer you can get away with calling yourself young.
      - deleted 5y ago
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jhack 5y ago
There goes the competitive pricing...
- singlow 5y ago
  Right, because the existing owners were giving you that price as a favor, and now the evil stockholders will demand that they chase away all of their customers by raising prices.
  - rudian 5y ago
    Yes. Everything you said is correct. Often startups sell at a loss, this is not news.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Typically existing owners have been spending those sweet, sweet VC bucks that go on "growth hacking", and after an exit event the business switches to actually trying to make some money instead of pretending MAUs are better than money for whatever reason they like this week. In the case of Backblaze they've only raised $5.3m over three rounds so that's unlikely. There wouldn't be much VC cash to hack growth with after 14 years.
bigtones 5y ago
$65 Million in ARR to list on the NASDAQ seems really low, especially with the 32% YoY growth. I don't think I've seen a SaaS company with < $100 Million in ARR in the year it listed.
- nekoashide 5y ago
  Your not wrong, there's been a huge number of companies listing over the last year and some of questionable size and profitability. Everybody sees the market as a huge money machine and all these companies want a piece.
- codegeek 5y ago
  It happens. One of our competitors IPO'd at 30M in ARR.
  - tomashertus 5y ago
    How they have been doing?
    - codegeek 5y ago
      Not too bad even though it is a big market and lot of key players including us.
- deleted 5y ago
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jsploit 5y ago
Previous S-1 discussion (this is an amendment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912799
braum 5y ago
Fidelity is handling the IPO and if you have been a customer of BackBlaze for a while apparently you will get to buy before public, up to 1,000 shares between $15-17 per share. That is my understanding.
- benburleson 5y ago
  That seems pretty huge, if true.
  - knowfilter 5y ago
    bigly huge
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  A family member and I are both Backblaze customers, they received a surveymonkey link to indicate interest in an IPO share allocation through Fidelity. If there’s a way to get on that list, I’m interested if anyone knows.
  - jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    I just found it in my spam. It was sent on Oct 22nd, you had to reply by Oct 27th. Damn.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Here did you hear about this?
- braum 5y ago
  Well I'm a BackBlaze customer and have been for a year or more. Not sure what else would qualify me to be part of the IPO before it goes public. Also AFAIK there is nothing preventing them from allowing customers to be part of it, but there may be a limiting factor. Some way to narrow the list. I have more than one computer subscribed, that could be part of the filter.
- FfejL 5y ago
vaughan 5y ago
I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart. I have never got it to backup my files ever. Their settings dialog integrates with macOS preferences and freezes while it scans for files to backup without giving me any status update. It uploads so damn slowly it’s pretty useless. If I was to move/rename things around it would take weeks more to reupload. Every time I try to ignore some files so it’s actually useful, it blocks my system prefs again and takes forever to rescan. I honestly don’t know how anyone uses it. Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  Not a BB user, but 100% agreed that CCC is fantastic, reliable, fast, etc.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  I'm sorry if I missed something, but you twice paid for long subscriptions for a service that did not work for you? What made you choose the two year plan when trying it the second time? Why did you pick the two year option at all the first time before trying it?
  - vaughan 5y ago
    I forgot it didn't work the last time, and I needed an offsite backup solution. I was optimistic that I could configure the right excludes so it would work, but the sys pref change made this impossible. It takes a few weeks to upload everything, and by that time the trial has expired.
    - tallanvor 5y ago
      Upload time is very dependent on your ISP, not to mention your hardware. On the rare occasions that I generate 100+ GB of data that gets backed up, it takes Backblaze less than a day, but I have a 750/500Mbps connection, which certainly helps.
nodesocket 5y ago
Here is their roadshow video for those like me that are more audio and visual. Great information in the video with their CEO and CFO. Funny that Matthew Prince (Cloudflare founder and CEO) is included in the roadshow video pumping up Backblaze when Cloudflare just announced a directly competing product. DigitalOcean (huge recent IPO and tendies) is also listed as a partner of Backblaze. I wonder if DigitalOcean object storage is built on-top of Backblaze B2? https://www.netroadshow.com/custom/IPO/Backblaze/retail/roadshow.html https://www.netroadshow.com/custom/IPO/Backblaze/retail/road... I applied for IPO shares from Robinhood. Robinhood is my play brokerage, but they do have the best IPO platform.
moooo99 5y ago
I love the Backblaze personal backup but never used another product by them. Wish them the best of luck, thats a super tough market for sure!
bastardoperator 5y ago
I've been using their product for awhile, I even have my 72 year old mom on it. Solid backups, gets out of my way, great price. Congrats to the Backblaze team!
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Wow, how were you able to digitize your mother?
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    She taught me computers. Many years ago she worked for Unisys so computers have always been a thing in our house. A lot has changed since then but she does okay when the computer isn't a windows machine.
rsync 5y ago
I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this market and I assume the pivot to B2 was to build something more sustainable with a much higher price and usage ceiling. Regardless, roughly 85% of the user-base are paying $7/mo for "unlimited backup". I wish them good luck.
- matthewmcg 5y ago
  "Fickle"? I've been a subscriber to the unlimited tier since seemingly forever, and I didn't realize it was now $7/mo instead of $5/mo. I think in the aggregate, subscriptions are pretty sticky due to inertia, etc.
  - saghm 5y ago
    Is it possible that the $7 rate was only for new customers from the point the price change was instated, rather than for existing customers?
    - arsome 5y ago
      No, they did increase it for existing users. - One of those fickle users who bought all the extra credits he could at the original price.
      - apple4ever 5y ago
        And I'm one of those fickle users who was never notified about the price increase until it was due, and could not convince them to be a good company and let me extend at the old price for another year since I'm a good long term customer.
  - rsync 5y ago
    ""Fickle"? I've been a subscriber to the unlimited tier since seemingly forever, and I didn't realize it was now $7/mo instead of $5/mo. I think in the aggregate, subscriptions are pretty sticky due to inertia, etc." I wish that were the case and I wish that all customers were like you. However, I have been tracking - and discussing - these rates with this target market for longer than Backblaze has existed and this market segment is pretty ruthless. They expect google-quality infrastructure at $0-$5 per month and are constantly shopping providers. We don't market to them at all anymore ... although, I personally can't resist posting in /r/datahoarder from time to time because I like the group ...
lakecresva 5y ago
> all shares of Class B common stock will automatically convert into shares of Class A common stock on the earlier of (i) the seven-year anniversary of the closing date of this offering... This is an interesting olive branch to class A shareholders, but is there a reasonable way for them to prevent class B holders from just extending the deadline by amending the articles?
DantesKite 5y ago
Well, definitely ignoring this stock on Robinhood...
rvz 5y ago
Let's just say that if you missed CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1], BackBlaze is another instant buy in my books. Another real tech IPO once again. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799
- jterrys 5y ago
  I picked up 400 shares on their IPO back in 2019. And then 100 more when they hovered around $14. Suffice to say I'm pretty happy with my portfolio with them today.
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    Jeez why in Europe we cannot have nice things:( Only IPO available to me and resembling a tech IPO was of ecommerce website in 2020, they used the money to paid their debts and share price currently is at the subscription price level.
DominoTree 5y ago
Their periodic drive failure reports and whatnot tell me that they probably have a lot of their other shit together as well - always a gamble but I’d rather invest in a company with their product together and the biggest worry of them being acquired versus something flashy
- tksb 5y ago
  Same consensus here. Followed them for years via the HDD reports and will happily watch this play out.
- de_bioinf 5y ago
  I'm afraid I am not as confident as you in their HDD statistics. They used to make every mistake in the (statistics) book regarding their hazard ratio calculations. For example, once they came to the conclusion that a particular model of higher capacity had a higher reliability than the same model of lower capacity. My Cox hazard calculations showed that their hazard profiles were equal, but the higher capacity HDD were younger. The raw data is worth gold, though.
UnlockedSecrets 5y ago
Where does one go to start investing in IPO's such as these?
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  If they are pre-IPO you can reach out the company and they will often be able to fold you into a funding round if you are accredited and have sufficient cash. There are a number of sites that cater to social seed investing, and other early rounds, as well as sites specific to accredited investors. I started out on sites like Seedinvest, Fundersclub, Startengine, and a few others. There are other sites if you are writing really big checks, instead of little ones. There are a few sites like Sharespost & Equitzen selling pre-IPO shares too, so you can express interest in a company and get some stock if someone doesn't want the very long lockup period prior to a liquidity event. It is also possible to buy into a SPAC that has stated intentions to buy a pre-IPO company and bring it public.
deleted 5y ago
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KZeillmann 5y ago
It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc. I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?
- dannyw 5y ago
  I use rclone on a grandfathered unlimited Google Apps account. Too many Googlers on HN, so I'm not going to share how much I store, but... it's great.
- jinto36 5y ago
  I originally was on Crashplan until they killed the consumer service- my main motivation for going with Crashplan was based on 1) ability to set set deleted files to never be removed from backup sets automatically, and 2) no restriction for running the client on Windows Server. I've definitely had cases where I only realized that I had removed a file I wanted after the 30 day window that Backblaze sets for keeping deleted files. Also, I happen to run Windows Server on a couple of boxes in my house for fun and I'd like to back them up- something I can't do with the Backblaze client. Then Crashplan killed the consumer service, leaving the Small Business service for rather more money. Recently they announced that they'll be instituting restrictions on file types and deleted file retention. I moved to IDrive for my endpoints because of the pricing being more competitive than any other option. Their Web UI isn't as good as Crashplan, the client UI is also pretty poor, it's more difficult to figure out what the client is actually doing, and I had times when it would get stuck on files for days/weeks on large backup sets. However, it's actively developed and they've fixed some issues in recent months. It's cheap enough that it's hard to complain. For my Windows Servers, now I use Duplicacy, which can target a few different cloud storage providers. I tried Backblaze B2 first, which was a bit expensive for me in the end when I realized how large the backup set was- after a year it would have been cheaper to build a NAS and stick it at a friends house and mirror to it. Currently I'm using Google Drive as a storage target using a Gapps for business account, as the storage limits are currently "suggestions". Though I am aware that is something that could go away eventually as well. Hopefully by then I'll be out of graduate school and able to afford a less-makeshift storage target. That aside though, Duplicacy works pretty well if you're looking for something for larger backup sets that does a bit more than Rsync/Rclone (specifically deduplication) which can target both local and cloud backends, and has both command-line and graphical interfaces. The optional GUI for Duplicacy is pretty simple local web interface but it works.
bryans 5y ago
I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.
- sltkr 5y ago
  Why do you assume they make no money off that? A 10TB HDD costs about $250. At $7/month, they earn that back in 3 years, way below the mean time to failure. Of course there's overhead too, but a lot of that goes down with scale, so I'm sure they're happy with your business.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Well here is what they said two years ago: A 9 TByte backup costs Backblaze about $35/month to provide in raw storage costs (electricity, rent for where to store the drives, etc), and that doesn't include the extra money we need to employ "G&A" people (General and Administrative) I'm not sure why it's quite that high, but 1/60th of a server is another $150 and 1/60th of keeping that server housed and powered is going to eat another chunk of that $7 monthly fee. And then add another 20% to all the costs to account for the capacity spent on parity.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Then there are users like me, 1.6TB backed up ;)
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Why? If you total your car, do you feel bad that the insurance company paid $35k for a brand new car? Surely, you have not paid $35k in premiums. Don't ever feel bad for businesses that advertise and then you happen to use the product as intended. I think of these free-pooling companies in a similar vien as insurance firms. Some customers are very profitable and some are not. But they did the ROI for marketing it as "Unlimited" which brings new customers (again some profitable and others not so much). There is probably a regression equation that models profitability of such a business.
jlmorton 5y ago
I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us something like $5,000/month, almost entirely due to PutObject calls. (I'm sure there are ways we could better architect this, but it is what it is). If we moved this to Backblaze, we'd essentially only be charged for the storage, which is maybe 1TB at most. We're going to bombard the service with tens of millions of requests for like $5/month in storage costs. How can this work for them?
- jffry 5y ago
  It could work if B2 customers use the service in a diverse enough variety of patterns to where the economics still work out in aggregate.
  - jlmorton 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure something like that is the strategy. The pricing is simple and easily understandable as-is. It's a nice marketing point to say all uploads are free, aside from storage costs. Still, even if they had some ridiculously high surcharge for excess PUTs, I think it would be understandable, and would encourage people like me to architect a different solution that doesn't involve tens of millions of PUTs.
- Implicated 5y ago
  I don't know anything about the technical sides of how these services are built, but through a client I do put heavy use to the B2 service and I can tell you there are some differences (backblaze covers some of that here [0]) in the way the services work. I get the feeling some of those are how they're shaving cost. [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-hidden-costs-of-s3-compatibility/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...
  - 5y ago
robbiemitchell 5y ago
Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (version 1.5.2.390) that NO LONGER WORKS (too old, needs updating). You are paying for a service you are not using. You have two choices: 1) Upgrade your Mac OS X 10.5 computer called "rlmmbp" to the latest Backblaze. Just visit our homepage and download it and install right over the top of what you have already, here is a URL: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm (Will take less than 5 seconds, totally free, you are already paying!) 2) Do nothing -> in 7 more days I will delete that machine's backup and all of the files in the backup, and you will be paying for an unused license. (I can provide instructions on how to cancel your billing if you need them.) If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at the email address below: - Brian Wilson CTO, Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.
  - robbiemitchell 5y ago
    I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I responded to this email right away. He responded to my questions in a lengthy email, which I'll paste again here because I had the foresight to ask in advance for future permission to post publicly. === Hi Robbie, thanks for getting back to me! It's hard getting through the email marketing overload. :-) > Would you be amenable to holding off on deleting the backup > for two weeks (instead of one) No worries, the most important part is that you are aware the computer is no longer actually performing fresh backups of new data. We can wait a while. > would you mind if I published your email publicly? Go ahead, and one of our marketing guys (Yev) already saw your tweet go by, it made everybody in our office laugh too. I'm off in my corner watching logs and emailing the random old customer, they didn't know I do this. :-) One of the things I've been amazed at doing backup software is how many assumptions I made at the start that aren't true and the MODERN Backblaze software works around: 1) assumption: your disk on your laptop will reliably store bytes or fail. Wrong, it can throw random bits, undetected unless Backblaze keeps its own parallel check sums. 2) assumption: laptop RAM works reliably. Wrong, I think there is a reason servers run ECC RAM, and I'm confused why many laptops choose not to. I guess saving $5 is more important than data Integrity? 3) assumption: the HTTP posts either work or fail. Wrong: WAY MORE OFTEN than the file system are undetected silent data corruption. Solution: client end to end SHA hashes. 4) assumption: customers are sane and won't "edit" the Backblaze internal data structures sitting on the customer's laptop. Nope! If customers are computer beginners they tend to behave nicely, and the most advanced customers are very careful, but there is this crazy middle ground who know enough to be dangerous to themselves. :-) I really really think that the most modern version of Backblaze (2.3.1 and later) is quite stable and might run flawlessly for a decade on a computer, but some of those early versions like anything starting with a 1.0 or 1.5 scare me because there are too many assumptions in them, not paranoid enough. Yes, the old versions WILL WORK for 99 percent of customers, but at our customer numbers that means every day we have to explain why a restore failed to some poor guy who chose to edit his Backblaze data structures corrupting his own backup and we didn't detect it soon enough. Our most recent client versions are deeply, profoundly paranoid software that basically assumes your laptop is right smack dab in the middle of melting down, throwing disk and RAM errors as an insane laptop owner not only ignores the warning signs of impending data Armageddon, but fights with Backblaze trying to defeat it from backing up because the customer is worried Backblaze is "wasting his bandwidth". I feel good about this, it's like my whole career was training up to write this incredibly important piece of software. -- Brian Wilson. CTO Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com
hiyer 5y ago
Congratulations! Been using them for backup for years (still on the free tier though :-P) and I'm a happy customer.
bobbles 5y ago
Backblaze has been a godsend for me - I've been paying for years and only used it 2 or 3 times but both were recovery of files I NEEDED and was so so happy to have stored in BB. The ability to pull an individual file as needed has been amazing.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
Does that mean no more HDD reports?
m0zg 5y ago
FWIW, they did save my ass a couple of times, and for that I'm thankful. But I don't think their pricing is elastic at all. If it were to cross $10/mo per machine, I'd just roll my own, as I have a number of machines, and it's not difficult to roll my own.
alex_young 5y ago
Seems like they have a decent business for home computer users, but the real story is B2. B2 accounted for $14M in ARR as of June 2020, and $21.8M as of June of 2021. That sector of the business could well outstrip the consumer side in a few quarters if growth continues.
stevecalifornia 5y ago
I wrote Backblaze and said "I would pay to ship you a drive so I don't have to upload 500GB over my consumer internet. That is my biggest pain point." and then the customer service rep replied that it wouldn't be a good business model to do that. Why is the customer service rep making these decisions? Just forward the email to your biz dev team.
- rasz 5y ago
  I think you are experiencing a culture shock after receiving a honest answer from a business. - drive you send arrives damaged - drive you send gets lost in transit - your friend hears about this great new offer and sends 100TB of drives expecting $7/m offer to stand and someone at Backblaze to build pods out of his random drives. - etc etc
- dannyw 5y ago
  Have you tried writing to Google about requesting they digitize a few old photo albums and upload it to your Google Photos account?
- brynjolf 5y ago
  I thought we were in November not September...
femto113 5y ago
This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin has about 13 EiB "pledged", so if you consider those measurements comparable the $ of valuation per EiB is similar. Businesses generally get valued more on what they bring in than what they own however, and Backblaze takes in ~$65 million/year revenue (~$175K/day). I'm not entirely clear what would be analogous to revenue for Filecoin, but they "mine" ~330K coins per day, which at current prices is about $21 million (or $7.8 billion per year?). Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now). Backblaze did look into farming Chia at some point[1], don't know if they've done similar experiments with Filecoin, but it definitely seems like there is a profound disconnect between these two worlds (which could be the result of some other factor, like the USD value of Bitcoin). [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-to-farm/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-...
- deleted 5y ago
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- snarf21 5y ago
  Pyramid schemes shouldn't be compared to real companies.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  Happy Backblaze customer here (for a Windows Laptop I admin, for the rest I happily use rsync.net). I couldn't care less about any company doing ICOs or anything else crypto related when it comes to backup services. I want a backup company doing one thing: backups, safe, reliable, paid by me.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  This is a brilliant comment, and despite it doesn't answer or address every question or concerns, it points our brain to an interesting direction of thought.
option_greek 5y ago
I was one of their users and compared to their competition, their offering was awful in the places that really mattered: Storing and Restoring of backup data Let's say you had your old laptop backed up and upgraded your hardware/freshly reinstalled your OS. Now your choices are: 1) Delete your old backup and continue with the new computers backup 2) Keep your old backup and don't backup your newly installed machine And if you are restoring files, you are forced to download them as zip (which is created asynchronously - so good amount of wait time) -> no automatic restore of files to selected locations. A lot of these weird constraints seem to be around keeping the egress and storage costs down which is fine but that makes them just another provider not in anyway the best. Lot of people like them but that's probably only because they haven't actually restored any of their backups. Just mindlessly paying their monthly subscription fees.
thom 5y ago
Excellent, they might finally be able to afford a status page and to fix things on a weekend.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Is there a way to get a sense of when the IPO will actually take place?
Gepsens 5y ago
I find it astonishing that nowadays an unpolished product can go to IPO.
- swarnie 5y ago
  And not the unprofitable company with no route to success asking for $122 million?
doh 5y ago
I always though that Apple should’ve acquired the company and offer Time Machine in the cloud. The seamlessness of the TM is at another level, but the missing cloud backup made it always somewhat limited option. Apple has a history of buying “feature” companies (the famous feedback Jobs gave to Houston on Dropbox). Apple eventually built this itself for iOS and it doesn’t seem like MacOS has much priority these days.
- simonh 5y ago
  iCloud Drive on the Mac with desktop and documents sync is pretty decent. I know it's not the same as full system backup. Yep, cloud Time Machine would be nice but probably a bit expensive, but meanwhile I'm happy with Backblaze. The iOS client is dead handy.
  - doh 5y ago
    True on all. I think that’s where Apple eventually landed. The value of restoring the full file system is low in a rigid environment like the MacOS (they nudge you to use specific folder structure, etc). It would’ve been interesting if DropBox would sell to Apple back in the days, what would’ve the OSs looked like today.
bluedino 5y ago
I found this interesting with the current 'trend' of remote work: The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy. - snip - The market for such talented personnel is particularly competitive in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is located. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do and can frequently offer such personnel substantially greater compensation than we can offer. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business would be harmed.
debenedictis 5y ago
Max of 150 shares?
debenedictis 5y ago
Max 150 share?

Backblaze IPO

428 points by hippich 5y ago

tester756 5y ago

how much time it takes to write document like that? also that formatting, damn.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

apple4ever 5y ago

I dropped them for Arq. They kept raising their prices, and their support was bad. Just utterly pissed me off. Arq is cheaper and better (they actually have backup options!)

durnygbur 5y ago

Any chance to subscribe for their shares for an EU tax resident? List of EU based brokers accepting the subscriptions?

reacharavindh 5y ago
I am an EU resident, and I use Interactive Brokers to buy US shares. I hope I can buy Backblaze shares when they IPO.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  He wants to be in on the IPO I think, buying when it's reached the stock market is too late for that.
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    yes, this is my intention
    - Trufa 5y ago
      Let me know if you know of anything.
    - reacharavindh 5y ago
      Sorry, I am a newbie to this sort of thing. I only ever buy stocks in the open market for my small portfolio of personal investments. Is it even possible to get shares _before_ an IPO? I thought there were only private investments and shares(after an IPO). One wouldn't call private investments the same as "shares" would they? Even if so, then why is the same bank/financial institution that manages the IPO involved in making a private investment in a company? Wouldn't you need to contact the founders of the company as they are the owners until the IPO?
      - durnygbur 5y ago
        In big shortcut - usually there are few banks and institutions involved in the process of the IPO. Some of them offer individual brokerage accounts and let their customers to subscribe to shares pre-IPO at the subscription price.
        reacharavindh 5y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. I thought the SEC filing shows X number of shares being brought to the IPO, which meant they would hit the market at open, but then it never is too simple ;-)
    - masterof0 5y ago
      Are you able to use SoFI? SoFi have a pre-IPO kinda thing, that lets you buy shares "before others".
odiroot 5y ago
Wouldn't you need to be a customer of one of the underwriting banks? Or, conversely, one level removed, so a customer of one of the big banks on the "VIP list" of initial buyers. I always thought retail-facing brokers are just too small fishes to be involved.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  e.g. Degiro enables current share owners to subscribe to new issue of shares in case of dilution, so here is the little hope I have...

busymom0 5y ago

They also released "Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2021" today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082379

kdasme 5y ago

Good luck Backblaze! It is a tough market for sure, especially with recent announcement from Cloudflare.

yellow_lead 5y ago
Didn't know Backblaze offers cloud storage. Cool to know!
- miked85 5y ago
  Isn't that basically their entire business?
  - yellow_lead 5y ago
    I only knew of them from their consumer business.
austinpena 5y ago
I think B2 and R2 target different market segments.
- flatiron 5y ago
  The store stuff on the internet and the… Wait. What’s the other segment?
  - austinpena 5y ago
    *opinions are mine and not my employers. It depends how you're going to access your data/ compliance needs. B2 per/TB storage is much cheaper than what R2 will be. R2 will enable cross-region availability which can be necessary for many companies choosing to adopt. It's my opinion that R2 targets more the likes of S3/ integrated storage providers rather than just being a "low cost" provider like Wasabi/Storj/B2/etc.
- encryptluks2 5y ago

henning 5y ago

> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!

airstrike 5y ago
That's pretty standard for most young and fast growing tech companies
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  It feels like Backblaze has been in the space for a while though? My uninformed picture of them was as a modest small/medium size business with a good niche product and probably some loyal customers type, not as an all-stop-sign-pulled-VC-funded-moonshot startup.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    I think the deal is they are spending more on growth than their profit, buying hardware for the next several years is expensive and as long as that growth keeps up quite a bit of value is being created.
- windthrown 5y ago
  At 14 years old, is Backblaze still considered "young"?
  - jstx1 5y ago
    The less successful you are, the longer you can get away with calling yourself young.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

jhack 5y ago

There goes the competitive pricing...

singlow 5y ago
Right, because the existing owners were giving you that price as a favor, and now the evil stockholders will demand that they chase away all of their customers by raising prices.
- rudian 5y ago
  Yes. Everything you said is correct. Often startups sell at a loss, this is not news.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Typically existing owners have been spending those sweet, sweet VC bucks that go on "growth hacking", and after an exit event the business switches to actually trying to make some money instead of pretending MAUs are better than money for whatever reason they like this week. In the case of Backblaze they've only raised $5.3m over three rounds so that's unlikely. There wouldn't be much VC cash to hack growth with after 14 years.

bigtones 5y ago

$65 Million in ARR to list on the NASDAQ seems really low, especially with the 32% YoY growth. I don't think I've seen a SaaS company with < $100 Million in ARR in the year it listed.

nekoashide 5y ago
Your not wrong, there's been a huge number of companies listing over the last year and some of questionable size and profitability. Everybody sees the market as a huge money machine and all these companies want a piece.
codegeek 5y ago
It happens. One of our competitors IPO'd at 30M in ARR.
- tomashertus 5y ago
  How they have been doing?
  - codegeek 5y ago
    Not too bad even though it is a big market and lot of key players including us.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jsploit 5y ago

Previous S-1 discussion (this is an amendment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912799

braum 5y ago

Fidelity is handling the IPO and if you have been a customer of BackBlaze for a while apparently you will get to buy before public, up to 1,000 shares between $15-17 per share. That is my understanding.

benburleson 5y ago
That seems pretty huge, if true.
- knowfilter 5y ago
  bigly huge
toomuchtodo 5y ago
A family member and I are both Backblaze customers, they received a surveymonkey link to indicate interest in an IPO share allocation through Fidelity. If there’s a way to get on that list, I’m interested if anyone knows.
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  I just found it in my spam. It was sent on Oct 22nd, you had to reply by Oct 27th. Damn.
jonplackett 5y ago
Here did you hear about this?
braum 5y ago
Well I'm a BackBlaze customer and have been for a year or more. Not sure what else would qualify me to be part of the IPO before it goes public. Also AFAIK there is nothing preventing them from allowing customers to be part of it, but there may be a limiting factor. Some way to narrow the list. I have more than one computer subscribed, that could be part of the filter.
FfejL 5y ago

vaughan 5y ago

I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart. I have never got it to backup my files ever. Their settings dialog integrates with macOS preferences and freezes while it scans for files to backup without giving me any status update. It uploads so damn slowly it’s pretty useless. If I was to move/rename things around it would take weeks more to reupload. Every time I try to ignore some files so it’s actually useful, it blocks my system prefs again and takes forever to rescan. I honestly don’t know how anyone uses it. Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.

chrisweekly 5y ago
Not a BB user, but 100% agreed that CCC is fantastic, reliable, fast, etc.
SahAssar 5y ago
I'm sorry if I missed something, but you twice paid for long subscriptions for a service that did not work for you? What made you choose the two year plan when trying it the second time? Why did you pick the two year option at all the first time before trying it?
- vaughan 5y ago
  I forgot it didn't work the last time, and I needed an offsite backup solution. I was optimistic that I could configure the right excludes so it would work, but the sys pref change made this impossible. It takes a few weeks to upload everything, and by that time the trial has expired.
  - tallanvor 5y ago
    Upload time is very dependent on your ISP, not to mention your hardware. On the rare occasions that I generate 100+ GB of data that gets backed up, it takes Backblaze less than a day, but I have a 750/500Mbps connection, which certainly helps.

nodesocket 5y ago

Here is their roadshow video for those like me that are more audio and visual. Great information in the video with their CEO and CFO. Funny that Matthew Prince (Cloudflare founder and CEO) is included in the roadshow video pumping up Backblaze when Cloudflare just announced a directly competing product. DigitalOcean (huge recent IPO and tendies) is also listed as a partner of Backblaze. I wonder if DigitalOcean object storage is built on-top of Backblaze B2? https://www.netroadshow.com/custom/IPO/Backblaze/retail/roadshow.html https://www.netroadshow.com/custom/IPO/Backblaze/retail/road... I applied for IPO shares from Robinhood. Robinhood is my play brokerage, but they do have the best IPO platform.

moooo99 5y ago

I love the Backblaze personal backup but never used another product by them. Wish them the best of luck, thats a super tough market for sure!

bastardoperator 5y ago

I've been using their product for awhile, I even have my 72 year old mom on it. Solid backups, gets out of my way, great price. Congrats to the Backblaze team!

dimitrios1 5y ago
Wow, how were you able to digitize your mother?
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  She taught me computers. Many years ago she worked for Unisys so computers have always been a thing in our house. A lot has changed since then but she does okay when the computer isn't a windows machine.

rsync 5y ago

I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this market and I assume the pivot to B2 was to build something more sustainable with a much higher price and usage ceiling. Regardless, roughly 85% of the user-base are paying $7/mo for "unlimited backup". I wish them good luck.

matthewmcg 5y ago
"Fickle"? I've been a subscriber to the unlimited tier since seemingly forever, and I didn't realize it was now $7/mo instead of $5/mo. I think in the aggregate, subscriptions are pretty sticky due to inertia, etc.
- saghm 5y ago
  Is it possible that the $7 rate was only for new customers from the point the price change was instated, rather than for existing customers?
  - arsome 5y ago
    No, they did increase it for existing users. - One of those fickle users who bought all the extra credits he could at the original price.
    - apple4ever 5y ago
      And I'm one of those fickle users who was never notified about the price increase until it was due, and could not convince them to be a good company and let me extend at the old price for another year since I'm a good long term customer.
- rsync 5y ago
  ""Fickle"? I've been a subscriber to the unlimited tier since seemingly forever, and I didn't realize it was now $7/mo instead of $5/mo. I think in the aggregate, subscriptions are pretty sticky due to inertia, etc." I wish that were the case and I wish that all customers were like you. However, I have been tracking - and discussing - these rates with this target market for longer than Backblaze has existed and this market segment is pretty ruthless. They expect google-quality infrastructure at $0-$5 per month and are constantly shopping providers. We don't market to them at all anymore ... although, I personally can't resist posting in /r/datahoarder from time to time because I like the group ...

lakecresva 5y ago

> all shares of Class B common stock will automatically convert into shares of Class A common stock on the earlier of (i) the seven-year anniversary of the closing date of this offering... This is an interesting olive branch to class A shareholders, but is there a reasonable way for them to prevent class B holders from just extending the deadline by amending the articles?

DantesKite 5y ago

Well, definitely ignoring this stock on Robinhood...

rvz 5y ago

Let's just say that if you missed CloudFlare [0] and DigitalOcean [1], BackBlaze is another instant buy in my books. Another real tech IPO once again. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262799

jterrys 5y ago
I picked up 400 shares on their IPO back in 2019. And then 100 more when they hovered around $14. Suffice to say I'm pretty happy with my portfolio with them today.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  Jeez why in Europe we cannot have nice things:( Only IPO available to me and resembling a tech IPO was of ecommerce website in 2020, they used the money to paid their debts and share price currently is at the subscription price level.

DominoTree 5y ago

Their periodic drive failure reports and whatnot tell me that they probably have a lot of their other shit together as well - always a gamble but I’d rather invest in a company with their product together and the biggest worry of them being acquired versus something flashy

tksb 5y ago
Same consensus here. Followed them for years via the HDD reports and will happily watch this play out.
de_bioinf 5y ago
I'm afraid I am not as confident as you in their HDD statistics. They used to make every mistake in the (statistics) book regarding their hazard ratio calculations. For example, once they came to the conclusion that a particular model of higher capacity had a higher reliability than the same model of lower capacity. My Cox hazard calculations showed that their hazard profiles were equal, but the higher capacity HDD were younger. The raw data is worth gold, though.

UnlockedSecrets 5y ago

Where does one go to start investing in IPO's such as these?

OrvalWintermute 5y ago
If they are pre-IPO you can reach out the company and they will often be able to fold you into a funding round if you are accredited and have sufficient cash. There are a number of sites that cater to social seed investing, and other early rounds, as well as sites specific to accredited investors. I started out on sites like Seedinvest, Fundersclub, Startengine, and a few others. There are other sites if you are writing really big checks, instead of little ones. There are a few sites like Sharespost & Equitzen selling pre-IPO shares too, so you can express interest in a company and get some stock if someone doesn't want the very long lockup period prior to a liquidity event. It is also possible to buy into a SPAC that has stated intentions to buy a pre-IPO company and bring it public.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

KZeillmann 5y ago

It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc. I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?

dannyw 5y ago
I use rclone on a grandfathered unlimited Google Apps account. Too many Googlers on HN, so I'm not going to share how much I store, but... it's great.
jinto36 5y ago
I originally was on Crashplan until they killed the consumer service- my main motivation for going with Crashplan was based on 1) ability to set set deleted files to never be removed from backup sets automatically, and 2) no restriction for running the client on Windows Server. I've definitely had cases where I only realized that I had removed a file I wanted after the 30 day window that Backblaze sets for keeping deleted files. Also, I happen to run Windows Server on a couple of boxes in my house for fun and I'd like to back them up- something I can't do with the Backblaze client. Then Crashplan killed the consumer service, leaving the Small Business service for rather more money. Recently they announced that they'll be instituting restrictions on file types and deleted file retention. I moved to IDrive for my endpoints because of the pricing being more competitive than any other option. Their Web UI isn't as good as Crashplan, the client UI is also pretty poor, it's more difficult to figure out what the client is actually doing, and I had times when it would get stuck on files for days/weeks on large backup sets. However, it's actively developed and they've fixed some issues in recent months. It's cheap enough that it's hard to complain. For my Windows Servers, now I use Duplicacy, which can target a few different cloud storage providers. I tried Backblaze B2 first, which was a bit expensive for me in the end when I realized how large the backup set was- after a year it would have been cheaper to build a NAS and stick it at a friends house and mirror to it. Currently I'm using Google Drive as a storage target using a Gapps for business account, as the storage limits are currently "suggestions". Though I am aware that is something that could go away eventually as well. Hopefully by then I'll be out of graduate school and able to afford a less-makeshift storage target. That aside though, Duplicacy works pretty well if you're looking for something for larger backup sets that does a bit more than Rsync/Rclone (specifically deduplication) which can target both local and cloud backends, and has both command-line and graphical interfaces. The optional GUI for Duplicacy is pretty simple local web interface but it works.

bryans 5y ago

I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.

sltkr 5y ago
Why do you assume they make no money off that? A 10TB HDD costs about $250. At $7/month, they earn that back in 3 years, way below the mean time to failure. Of course there's overhead too, but a lot of that goes down with scale, so I'm sure they're happy with your business.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Well here is what they said two years ago: A 9 TByte backup costs Backblaze about $35/month to provide in raw storage costs (electricity, rent for where to store the drives, etc), and that doesn't include the extra money we need to employ "G&A" people (General and Administrative) I'm not sure why it's quite that high, but 1/60th of a server is another $150 and 1/60th of keeping that server housed and powered is going to eat another chunk of that $7 monthly fee. And then add another 20% to all the costs to account for the capacity spent on parity.
Semaphor 5y ago
Then there are users like me, 1.6TB backed up ;)
systemvoltage 5y ago
Why? If you total your car, do you feel bad that the insurance company paid $35k for a brand new car? Surely, you have not paid $35k in premiums. Don't ever feel bad for businesses that advertise and then you happen to use the product as intended. I think of these free-pooling companies in a similar vien as insurance firms. Some customers are very profitable and some are not. But they did the ROI for marketing it as "Unlimited" which brings new customers (again some profitable and others not so much). There is probably a regression equation that models profitability of such a business.

jlmorton 5y ago

I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us something like $5,000/month, almost entirely due to PutObject calls. (I'm sure there are ways we could better architect this, but it is what it is). If we moved this to Backblaze, we'd essentially only be charged for the storage, which is maybe 1TB at most. We're going to bombard the service with tens of millions of requests for like $5/month in storage costs. How can this work for them?

jffry 5y ago
It could work if B2 customers use the service in a diverse enough variety of patterns to where the economics still work out in aggregate.
- jlmorton 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure something like that is the strategy. The pricing is simple and easily understandable as-is. It's a nice marketing point to say all uploads are free, aside from storage costs. Still, even if they had some ridiculously high surcharge for excess PUTs, I think it would be understandable, and would encourage people like me to architect a different solution that doesn't involve tens of millions of PUTs.
Implicated 5y ago
I don't know anything about the technical sides of how these services are built, but through a client I do put heavy use to the B2 service and I can tell you there are some differences (backblaze covers some of that here [0]) in the way the services work. I get the feeling some of those are how they're shaving cost. [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-hidden-costs-of-s3-compatibility/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...
- 5y ago

robbiemitchell 5y ago

Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (version 1.5.2.390) that NO LONGER WORKS (too old, needs updating). You are paying for a service you are not using. You have two choices: 1) Upgrade your Mac OS X 10.5 computer called "rlmmbp" to the latest Backblaze. Just visit our homepage and download it and install right over the top of what you have already, here is a URL: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm (Will take less than 5 seconds, totally free, you are already paying!) 2) Do nothing -> in 7 more days I will delete that machine's backup and all of the files in the backup, and you will be paying for an unused license. (I can provide instructions on how to cancel your billing if you need them.) If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at the email address below: - Brian Wilson CTO, Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com

ehsankia 5y ago
I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.
- robbiemitchell 5y ago
  I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I responded to this email right away. He responded to my questions in a lengthy email, which I'll paste again here because I had the foresight to ask in advance for future permission to post publicly. === Hi Robbie, thanks for getting back to me! It's hard getting through the email marketing overload. :-) > Would you be amenable to holding off on deleting the backup > for two weeks (instead of one) No worries, the most important part is that you are aware the computer is no longer actually performing fresh backups of new data. We can wait a while. > would you mind if I published your email publicly? Go ahead, and one of our marketing guys (Yev) already saw your tweet go by, it made everybody in our office laugh too. I'm off in my corner watching logs and emailing the random old customer, they didn't know I do this. :-) One of the things I've been amazed at doing backup software is how many assumptions I made at the start that aren't true and the MODERN Backblaze software works around: 1) assumption: your disk on your laptop will reliably store bytes or fail. Wrong, it can throw random bits, undetected unless Backblaze keeps its own parallel check sums. 2) assumption: laptop RAM works reliably. Wrong, I think there is a reason servers run ECC RAM, and I'm confused why many laptops choose not to. I guess saving $5 is more important than data Integrity? 3) assumption: the HTTP posts either work or fail. Wrong: WAY MORE OFTEN than the file system are undetected silent data corruption. Solution: client end to end SHA hashes. 4) assumption: customers are sane and won't "edit" the Backblaze internal data structures sitting on the customer's laptop. Nope! If customers are computer beginners they tend to behave nicely, and the most advanced customers are very careful, but there is this crazy middle ground who know enough to be dangerous to themselves. :-) I really really think that the most modern version of Backblaze (2.3.1 and later) is quite stable and might run flawlessly for a decade on a computer, but some of those early versions like anything starting with a 1.0 or 1.5 scare me because there are too many assumptions in them, not paranoid enough. Yes, the old versions WILL WORK for 99 percent of customers, but at our customer numbers that means every day we have to explain why a restore failed to some poor guy who chose to edit his Backblaze data structures corrupting his own backup and we didn't detect it soon enough. Our most recent client versions are deeply, profoundly paranoid software that basically assumes your laptop is right smack dab in the middle of melting down, throwing disk and RAM errors as an insane laptop owner not only ignores the warning signs of impending data Armageddon, but fights with Backblaze trying to defeat it from backing up because the customer is worried Backblaze is "wasting his bandwidth". I feel good about this, it's like my whole career was training up to write this incredibly important piece of software. -- Brian Wilson. CTO Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com

hiyer 5y ago

Congratulations! Been using them for backup for years (still on the free tier though :-P) and I'm a happy customer.

bobbles 5y ago

Backblaze has been a godsend for me - I've been paying for years and only used it 2 or 3 times but both were recovery of files I NEEDED and was so so happy to have stored in BB. The ability to pull an individual file as needed has been amazing.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

Does that mean no more HDD reports?

m0zg 5y ago

FWIW, they did save my ass a couple of times, and for that I'm thankful. But I don't think their pricing is elastic at all. If it were to cross $10/mo per machine, I'd just roll my own, as I have a number of machines, and it's not difficult to roll my own.

alex_young 5y ago

Seems like they have a decent business for home computer users, but the real story is B2. B2 accounted for $14M in ARR as of June 2020, and $21.8M as of June of 2021. That sector of the business could well outstrip the consumer side in a few quarters if growth continues.

stevecalifornia 5y ago

I wrote Backblaze and said "I would pay to ship you a drive so I don't have to upload 500GB over my consumer internet. That is my biggest pain point." and then the customer service rep replied that it wouldn't be a good business model to do that. Why is the customer service rep making these decisions? Just forward the email to your biz dev team.

rasz 5y ago
I think you are experiencing a culture shock after receiving a honest answer from a business. - drive you send arrives damaged - drive you send gets lost in transit - your friend hears about this great new offer and sends 100TB of drives expecting $7/m offer to stand and someone at Backblaze to build pods out of his random drives. - etc etc
dannyw 5y ago
Have you tried writing to Google about requesting they digitize a few old photo albums and upload it to your Google Photos account?
brynjolf 5y ago
I thought we were in November not September...

femto113 5y ago

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin has about 13 EiB "pledged", so if you consider those measurements comparable the $ of valuation per EiB is similar. Businesses generally get valued more on what they bring in than what they own however, and Backblaze takes in ~$65 million/year revenue (~$175K/day). I'm not entirely clear what would be analogous to revenue for Filecoin, but they "mine" ~330K coins per day, which at current prices is about $21 million (or $7.8 billion per year?). Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now). Backblaze did look into farming Chia at some point[1], don't know if they've done similar experiments with Filecoin, but it definitely seems like there is a profound disconnect between these two worlds (which could be the result of some other factor, like the USD value of Bitcoin). [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-to-farm/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-...

deleted 5y ago
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snarf21 5y ago
Pyramid schemes shouldn't be compared to real companies.
chinathrow 5y ago
Happy Backblaze customer here (for a Windows Laptop I admin, for the rest I happily use rsync.net). I couldn't care less about any company doing ICOs or anything else crypto related when it comes to backup services. I want a backup company doing one thing: backups, safe, reliable, paid by me.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
This is a brilliant comment, and despite it doesn't answer or address every question or concerns, it points our brain to an interesting direction of thought.

option_greek 5y ago

I was one of their users and compared to their competition, their offering was awful in the places that really mattered: Storing and Restoring of backup data Let's say you had your old laptop backed up and upgraded your hardware/freshly reinstalled your OS. Now your choices are: 1) Delete your old backup and continue with the new computers backup 2) Keep your old backup and don't backup your newly installed machine And if you are restoring files, you are forced to download them as zip (which is created asynchronously - so good amount of wait time) -> no automatic restore of files to selected locations. A lot of these weird constraints seem to be around keeping the egress and storage costs down which is fine but that makes them just another provider not in anyway the best. Lot of people like them but that's probably only because they haven't actually restored any of their backups. Just mindlessly paying their monthly subscription fees.

thom 5y ago

Excellent, they might finally be able to afford a status page and to fix things on a weekend.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Is there a way to get a sense of when the IPO will actually take place?

Gepsens 5y ago

I find it astonishing that nowadays an unpolished product can go to IPO.

swarnie 5y ago
And not the unprofitable company with no route to success asking for $122 million?

doh 5y ago

I always though that Apple should’ve acquired the company and offer Time Machine in the cloud. The seamlessness of the TM is at another level, but the missing cloud backup made it always somewhat limited option. Apple has a history of buying “feature” companies (the famous feedback Jobs gave to Houston on Dropbox). Apple eventually built this itself for iOS and it doesn’t seem like MacOS has much priority these days.

simonh 5y ago
iCloud Drive on the Mac with desktop and documents sync is pretty decent. I know it's not the same as full system backup. Yep, cloud Time Machine would be nice but probably a bit expensive, but meanwhile I'm happy with Backblaze. The iOS client is dead handy.
- doh 5y ago
  True on all. I think that’s where Apple eventually landed. The value of restoring the full file system is low in a rigid environment like the MacOS (they nudge you to use specific folder structure, etc). It would’ve been interesting if DropBox would sell to Apple back in the days, what would’ve the OSs looked like today.

bluedino 5y ago

I found this interesting with the current 'trend' of remote work: The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy. - snip - The market for such talented personnel is particularly competitive in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is located. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do and can frequently offer such personnel substantially greater compensation than we can offer. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business would be harmed.

debenedictis 5y ago

Max of 150 shares?

debenedictis 5y ago

Max 150 share?