5 ms·

Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't w

by anurag 3y ago

Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't want to think about infrastructure. We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.

mr90210 3y ago
Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting on Render. Good luck
schreiaj 3y ago
First off, congrats. Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit. The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out. Best of luck moving forward.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > 8 straight hours on a zoom call I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?
  - schreiaj 3y ago
    Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it into my schedule (between work and my other half's health issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of ER visits)
    - umach 3y ago
      I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our interview process a lot in the last year - it's much shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In addition, we are very aware that everyone has different personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it happen.
      - joshmanders 3y ago
        What exactly is going on where you need such long zoom meetings? 8 hours is insane, do you compensate people for this time?
      - schreiaj 3y ago
        Oh, I had to drop out of the process last year and have since found somewhere I'm actually really enjoying. I mostly wanted to follow up so if someone in my network asked me I could give them the most up to date information possible. I'd feel really bad if I was giving out of date information. I'm glad you've updated your process.
- anurag 3y ago
  Thank you. I agree that ask was a bit much for a lot of candidates; we updated our engineering interviews to be shorter and more manageable a few months ago.
- Djle 3y ago
  8 hours on a zoom call! That would be a hard pass for me.
adverbly 3y ago
Congrats on your funding round! I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases). Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?
- fnimick 3y ago
  > even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options https://supabase.com/pricing https://supabase.com/pricing (not affiliated, but a happy user)
moralestapia 3y ago
Hi @anurag, congrats on this funding round! I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol). Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres. I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution. If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  AWS had a SOAP API? What timeline are we in again?
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    Yup, it was a PITA to set up but, when you managed to, having a computer in the cloud that you just "created" with some code felt like magic.
  - samrolken 3y ago
    https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/using-soap-api.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/using...
- anurag 3y ago
  Render's second engineer (who's still here and doing really well) had no prior professional experience in software and was entirely self-taught. I encourage you to apply!
efields 3y ago
Am I reading that right that the healthcare benefit only covers a single _dependent_?
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  From the careers page: > 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and all your dependents. FSAs available too.
seagreen 3y ago
Do you have thoughts on the Heroku->Render dynamic? Is there a name for it? I've seen it enough now to recognize a solid pattern for a successful business: 1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience 2. Users love it, it's successful 3. Company stop treating users well 4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated. How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?
- the_bear 3y ago
  That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing their users. I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B which probably means they're still many years away from step 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making their replacement. I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.
  - seagreen 3y ago
    I generally agree with your comment, but isn't there an exception for companies that do well enough early enough to let the founders keep control with supervoting stock? Then the founders can do whatever they want... which might be make short term money but doesn't have to be.
- anurag 3y ago
  A subtle distinction is that it's not Heroku treating users poorly — it's Salesforce, and it's not the same people who were at the company even just ~2 years ago. With Render, I'd rather show than tell. As an interesting data point, we've now existed as an independent entity longer than Heroku did, and we're truly just getting started.
franciscop 3y ago
As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm again looking for an alternative. There was something that Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits, for projects that have low usage. I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby. So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool. If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).
- adparadox 3y ago
  I had the exact same problem with Render, but I wouldn't expect them to handle this situation because I'm guessing it's kind of an edge case? I ended up using a DigitalOcean Droplet + CapRover to do this, and then wrote a giant article detailing all my steps in case that's useful: https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-from-one-cloud-server https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-f....
  - tomwojcik 3y ago
    I don't think that's an edge case. I'm addicted to creating new side projects and I think there's more of 'us'. These projects usually don't get any traction but I like that they work, they are there, accessible globally. I'm hosting a few using portainer and cloudflared on Synology NAS. This way everything is free, I have unlimited HDD and 10GB RAM. I keep running into some small issues and the CPU is terrible, but it works. :) Most of the time... Which is enough for me. https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer You just need to create a stack (in portainer) that has access to the git repo and select the compose file. That's more or less it.

by anurag 3y ago

mr90210 3y ago

Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting on Render. Good luck

schreiaj 3y ago

First off, congrats. Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit. The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out. Best of luck moving forward.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> 8 straight hours on a zoom call I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?
- schreiaj 3y ago
  Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it into my schedule (between work and my other half's health issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of ER visits)
  - umach 3y ago
    I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our interview process a lot in the last year - it's much shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In addition, we are very aware that everyone has different personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it happen.
    - joshmanders 3y ago
      What exactly is going on where you need such long zoom meetings? 8 hours is insane, do you compensate people for this time?
    - schreiaj 3y ago
      Oh, I had to drop out of the process last year and have since found somewhere I'm actually really enjoying. I mostly wanted to follow up so if someone in my network asked me I could give them the most up to date information possible. I'd feel really bad if I was giving out of date information. I'm glad you've updated your process.
anurag 3y ago
Thank you. I agree that ask was a bit much for a lot of candidates; we updated our engineering interviews to be shorter and more manageable a few months ago.
Djle 3y ago
8 hours on a zoom call! That would be a hard pass for me.

adverbly 3y ago

Congrats on your funding round! I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases). Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?

fnimick 3y ago
> even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options https://supabase.com/pricing https://supabase.com/pricing (not affiliated, but a happy user)

moralestapia 3y ago

Hi @anurag, congrats on this funding round! I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol). Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres. I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution. If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.

ShamelessC 3y ago
AWS had a SOAP API? What timeline are we in again?
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Yup, it was a PITA to set up but, when you managed to, having a computer in the cloud that you just "created" with some code felt like magic.
- samrolken 3y ago
  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/using-soap-api.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/using...
anurag 3y ago
Render's second engineer (who's still here and doing really well) had no prior professional experience in software and was entirely self-taught. I encourage you to apply!

efields 3y ago

Am I reading that right that the healthcare benefit only covers a single _dependent_?

lotsofpulp 3y ago
From the careers page: > 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and all your dependents. FSAs available too.

seagreen 3y ago

Do you have thoughts on the Heroku->Render dynamic? Is there a name for it? I've seen it enough now to recognize a solid pattern for a successful business: 1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience 2. Users love it, it's successful 3. Company stop treating users well 4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated. How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?

the_bear 3y ago
That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing their users. I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B which probably means they're still many years away from step 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making their replacement. I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.
- seagreen 3y ago
  I generally agree with your comment, but isn't there an exception for companies that do well enough early enough to let the founders keep control with supervoting stock? Then the founders can do whatever they want... which might be make short term money but doesn't have to be.
anurag 3y ago
A subtle distinction is that it's not Heroku treating users poorly — it's Salesforce, and it's not the same people who were at the company even just ~2 years ago. With Render, I'd rather show than tell. As an interesting data point, we've now existed as an independent entity longer than Heroku did, and we're truly just getting started.

franciscop 3y ago

As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm again looking for an alternative. There was something that Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits, for projects that have low usage. I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby. So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool. If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).

adparadox 3y ago
I had the exact same problem with Render, but I wouldn't expect them to handle this situation because I'm guessing it's kind of an edge case? I ended up using a DigitalOcean Droplet + CapRover to do this, and then wrote a giant article detailing all my steps in case that's useful: https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-from-one-cloud-server https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-f....
- tomwojcik 3y ago
  I don't think that's an edge case. I'm addicted to creating new side projects and I think there's more of 'us'. These projects usually don't get any traction but I like that they work, they are there, accessible globally. I'm hosting a few using portainer and cloudflared on Synology NAS. This way everything is free, I have unlimited HDD and 10GB RAM. I keep running into some small issues and the CPU is terrible, but it works. :) Most of the time... Which is enough for me. https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer You just need to create a stack (in portainer) that has access to the git repo and select the compose file. That's more or less it.