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+ People get paid, hopefully a few even get big $. - Investors want unicorn returns. Good luck!

bowsamic 4y ago
I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC
- nikanj 4y ago
  You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    > You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale
    - mrkurt 4y ago
      They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in companies they think could be worth multiple billions. If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company could be worth billions. In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime because they have money to build it out.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact that investors continue throwing money at it there are lots of companies, which are technically "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian and Nikola come to mind)
    - crsv 4y ago
      If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the model.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        If they’re expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno?
        lmeyerov 4y ago
        VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the community to professional financiers. As others wrote, that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the bankruptcies. Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc. I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture change to work through!
        bowsamic 4y ago
        Maybe they see a chance of it but they cannot seriously expect it EDIT: the comment I responded to was completely rewritten and replaced with a different one. Please don’t do this
        lmeyerov 4y ago
        The main base expectations are that out of all of Sequoias bets, some will become $5B+ co's, and for the next 18mo, deno can grow headcount with salaries unrelated to sustainability Some people involved might expect more, and I'm sure hope for more, but I'm a language designer & CEO, not a mind reader :)
    - nikanj 4y ago
      The VC model is not built on 10x exits. Later rounds, sure, but series A is definitely looking for larger multiplier.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brundolf 4y ago
What is their actual business model? I know there's Deno Deploy, and presumably they offer some kind of enterprise-support type deal. But the first is easily copied by competitors (in an already-crowded market), and the other isn't super lucrative. Is there anything else? I love Deno and want it to succeed, but it doesn't feel like a unicorn, and I'm worried about it being expected to become one
- kjksf 4y ago
  https://deno.com/deploy/pricing https://deno.com/deploy/pricing is their business model. They charge you for CPU and bandwidth more than they pay for it.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Right, my point is that any number of cloud providers could swoop in and offer the same product for probably cheaper
    - amsnl 4y ago
      This is generally true about every company though. Someone can always swoop in, and huge incumbents can always do it cheaper, at least in theory.
      - hollerith 4y ago
        Warren Buffett only invests in companies with what he calls a "moat" that make it hard for any other company to offer a similar product or service. Apple's moat, for example, is its institutional knowledge of design and maybe its relationships with its suppliers, e.g., their deal with TSMC to lock up most of TSMC's capacity on the 5-nm node. Another moat Apple has is consumers who do not like engaging in sysadmin battles with their consumer electronics. One of my friends, a 79-year-old woman, for example, told me once that she wouldn't consider buying a computer from any company except Apple. (I could probably induce her to change her mind on that, but it would take persistence and patient explanation on my part, and also I'm probably the only person who could change it.) The main way Apple has maintained (for 38 years!) its dominance in institutional knowledge of design is probably the fact that most of the young talented designers want to work for Apple (partly because most of the people willing to pay extra from good design in consumer electronics buy from Apple). Google Search's moat seems to be institutional knowledge on how to build a good search engine and access to data on what people search for and which search results they click. Strengthening the latter moat is the reason they're so interesting in having all traffic from the consumer's browser encrypted: namely, so that the consumer's ISP cannot sell data on the consumer's interactions with Google's search engine to any competing search engines. Another moat Google has is that most consumers will not take the trouble to change the default choice of the search engine used when the consumer types a non-URL into the location bar of the browser. Strengthening that moat explains Google's willingness to pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine and Google's interest in giving away Chrome and Android. Microsoft's moat: practically every organization uses computers and needs employees who know how to use those computers. They mostly choose Windows and Office because that is what most prospective employees know. In turn, when a young person improves his or her attractiveness to prospective employers by learning computer skills, they usually choose to learn Windows and Office because that is what is running on the computers of prospective employers.

I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC

nikanj 4y ago
You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying
- bowsamic 4y ago
  > You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale
  - mrkurt 4y ago
    They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in companies they think could be worth multiple billions. If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company could be worth billions. In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime because they have money to build it out.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact that investors continue throwing money at it there are lots of companies, which are technically "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian and Nikola come to mind)
  - crsv 4y ago
    If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the model.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      If they’re expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno?
      - lmeyerov 4y ago
        VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the community to professional financiers. As others wrote, that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the bankruptcies. Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc. I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture change to work through!
        bowsamic 4y ago
        Maybe they see a chance of it but they cannot seriously expect it EDIT: the comment I responded to was completely rewritten and replaced with a different one. Please don’t do this
        lmeyerov 4y ago
        The main base expectations are that out of all of Sequoias bets, some will become $5B+ co's, and for the next 18mo, deno can grow headcount with salaries unrelated to sustainability Some people involved might expect more, and I'm sure hope for more, but I'm a language designer & CEO, not a mind reader :)
  - nikanj 4y ago
    The VC model is not built on 10x exits. Later rounds, sure, but series A is definitely looking for larger multiplier.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brundolf 4y ago

What is their actual business model? I know there's Deno Deploy, and presumably they offer some kind of enterprise-support type deal. But the first is easily copied by competitors (in an already-crowded market), and the other isn't super lucrative. Is there anything else? I love Deno and want it to succeed, but it doesn't feel like a unicorn, and I'm worried about it being expected to become one

kjksf 4y ago
https://deno.com/deploy/pricing https://deno.com/deploy/pricing is their business model. They charge you for CPU and bandwidth more than they pay for it.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Right, my point is that any number of cloud providers could swoop in and offer the same product for probably cheaper
  - amsnl 4y ago
    This is generally true about every company though. Someone can always swoop in, and huge incumbents can always do it cheaper, at least in theory.
    - hollerith 4y ago
      Warren Buffett only invests in companies with what he calls a "moat" that make it hard for any other company to offer a similar product or service. Apple's moat, for example, is its institutional knowledge of design and maybe its relationships with its suppliers, e.g., their deal with TSMC to lock up most of TSMC's capacity on the 5-nm node. Another moat Apple has is consumers who do not like engaging in sysadmin battles with their consumer electronics. One of my friends, a 79-year-old woman, for example, told me once that she wouldn't consider buying a computer from any company except Apple. (I could probably induce her to change her mind on that, but it would take persistence and patient explanation on my part, and also I'm probably the only person who could change it.) The main way Apple has maintained (for 38 years!) its dominance in institutional knowledge of design is probably the fact that most of the young talented designers want to work for Apple (partly because most of the people willing to pay extra from good design in consumer electronics buy from Apple). Google Search's moat seems to be institutional knowledge on how to build a good search engine and access to data on what people search for and which search results they click. Strengthening the latter moat is the reason they're so interesting in having all traffic from the consumer's browser encrypted: namely, so that the consumer's ISP cannot sell data on the consumer's interactions with Google's search engine to any competing search engines. Another moat Google has is that most consumers will not take the trouble to change the default choice of the search engine used when the consumer types a non-URL into the location bar of the browser. Strengthening that moat explains Google's willingness to pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine and Google's interest in giving away Chrome and Android. Microsoft's moat: practically every organization uses computers and needs employees who know how to use those computers. They mostly choose Windows and Office because that is what most prospective employees know. In turn, when a young person improves his or her attractiveness to prospective employers by learning computer skills, they usually choose to learn Windows and Office because that is what is running on the computers of prospective employers.