3 ms·

Vercel is the second company to “eat the cloud from outside in”. (https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go) its now my defacto playb

• youngtaff 4y ago
  Cloudflare own and run the services they’re offering whereas it looks like Vercal storage is just other people’s services rebranded
  • asadm 4y ago
    Users don't care about that.
    • proxy9 4y ago
      I think they care. Vercel is VC money. Not even close to profitability. Anyone building anything but a toy needs to take into consideration that Vercel might not be here in 2 years from now
    • waboremo 4y ago
      Generally, that is very true. But when the bills start hitting, users absolutely do care and will go out of their way to avoid it.
      • asadm 4y ago
        Only when it reaches ridiculous enough number. Even as an individual who can easily do any cloud/k8s/lambdas/firecracker, I am paying Vercel a few hundred for my side projects.
        • waboremo 4y ago
          True, but the ridiculous number might be lower than you expect. Vercel in particular has got a lot of feedback about their pricing!
    • the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
      … for as long as there is no cheaper competition.
    • mrkurt 4y ago
      They do, actually. We don't say anything about running our own infrastructure. And every time someone finds out, they're like "why didn't you lead with that?" I'm surprised how much people care about what's under the covers.
      • eropple 4y ago
        I think that in many ways is because Fly's approach is sufficiently high-minded (in other words, aiming most comfortably at relatively difficult problems) that it's probably pretty automatic to assume that it's built on an existing hyperscaler. Mentioning that you run your own infrastructure adds encouragement that you know what you're doing. Given the general state of PaaS offerings, this is a differentiator.
• ghc 4y ago
  Classic VC-backed B2B play. The trick, however, is finding a "wedge" people actually want on its own. Unfortunately that seems to be easier said than done.
  • swyx 4y ago
    well a good start is betting on the most popular framework in the most popular language and building the production ready stuff that is missing that the framework authors constitutionally cannot compete with you on :) there are better wedges financially speaking but theres pretty much no bigger bottom up developer wedge than this one
    • mattwad 4y ago
      They built the framework too, or was it a purchase originally?
      • dabeeeenster 4y ago
        Guillermo the Vercel CEO made Next.js
      • doodlesdev 4y ago
        Vercel (then called Zeit) developed NextJS themselves. I believe swyx meant React when he said "framework", even though one can argue that's technically incorrect it's been commonplace for some time to call it a framework.
  • cccybernetic 4y ago
    There’s a lot of magic with Vercel, but I think the true “wedge” was clear to many people: DX. The trick was really the execution, which they nailed. They realized early that there was a whole class of developers out there, many of them quite talented, who couldn’t stand SSH’ing into Linux boxes, configuring htaccess files, installing SSL certificates, etc. Many of these developers also worked at big companies, and held sway. They distilled the entire deployment process into a few clicks and boom, you have a real, functioning, fast website. Then they added templates, good marketing, and doubled down on React. The rest is history. It’s a well executed vision and I give them a lot of props for that.
• waboremo 4y ago
  I believe this is a core factor as to why Supabase hasn't joined Cloudflare and Vercel, they don't have that "outside" aspect. By all other counts, they are well established to do so and who knows maybe they do have something in the works to tie in their offerings together from the "outside".
  • swyx 4y ago
    (am supabase investor) fortunately supabase's value prop is so straight forward it doesnt quite need to do the "outside-in" maneuver. just make postgres into a developer friendly platform. huge TAM in itself. another investor i asked on why they put $millions into supabase simply said "RDS has more than $1b ARR"
    • waboremo 4y ago
      Great point about being direct, and the priority on DX seems to be a semi-moat in itself, worked for Vercel and Supabase so far!
• vultour 4y ago
  Will they run my workloads without requiring my attention for decades? I'd love to rewrite and move some old PHP sites from my webhost, but that one has been hosting them without requiring my attention for probably close to 15 years. I'm a little skeptical these fancy cloud runtimes will even exist a few years from now.
  • diroussel 4y ago
    Also nodejs is deprecating versions at an impressive rate. Todays LTS will be out of date soon. AWS and thus Vercel have to follow along. So you can’t run a node based serverless app for more than a year or two before you either put the work in to upgrade or just cross your fingers that the forced upgrade won’t break your app.
• c-hendricks 4y ago
  > https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1417136897894326277 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1417136897894326277 Companies are leasing out the core aspects of computing (storage, networking, CPU, GPU, auth), nothing really insightful here. Just your average day in capitalism. > many other platforms try to start off offering everything under the sun Do they? Or do they also start small, then build up over the years until they have everything under the sun, rinsing and repeating the process.
• throwingrocks 4y ago
  > now my defacto playbook for building lasting bottom up disruptive cloud companies What companies have you built (or played a role in building) using this "playbook" that fit your description?