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You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if

You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.

tptacek 3y ago
It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
- culi 3y ago
  Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
  - tptacek 3y ago
    If we're "honest" and "transparent", it's not a conscious strategy to sign up customers. It's just the easiest way for us to write. Meanwhile: we're a hardware-based global hosting company. We've always been externally funded. That's how you build a global hardware-backed hosting company, because servers and colocation and infra engineers are expensive. There are things that happen that disappoint customers that we care a lot about. Reliability issues several months ago absolutely fit that bill. So does hiring: we paused hiring for most of our engineering roles because we weren't happy with the experience candidates were getting. I don't know how "honest" and "transparent" we are about those things, but I do feel like when we're asked about them, we give straight answers. There are other things that happen that disappoint people that we don't care so much about. Being unhappy that we took external funding to build out our fleet and improve reliability would count as one of those things. Again with the straight answers: I wouldn't expect us to spend too much time trying to "rebound" from this announcement.
  - PKop 3y ago
    >Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us Speak for yourself. Announcements of adequate funding inspires confidence fly will have longevity and resources to scale. Other concerns can be tackled in other blog posts, but nothing about the announcement of funding should inspire less confidence, what sense does that make?
    - mananaysiempre 3y ago
      The issue is not raising money, precisely, the issue is raising money by selling large amounts of controlling equity (as is usually the case for VC funding and IPOs, with a few notable exceptions). The purchasers will expect their money’s worth, and they will (eventually) not hesitate to exercise the control it bought them in order to get that. VCs in particular will expect much more than their money’s worth, or (most of the time) for the company to die trying to earn it, and they won’t hesitate to force the latter in pursuit of the former. This increase in variance is literally their investment model. So if VCs expect their investments to fail most of the time, and I see a company take VC money, I must have very strong reasons if I’m to disbelieve the VCs and expect the company to succeed—and I’m not following a venture investment strategy when I choose a tech supplier. IPOs are somewhat milder in their intrinsic character, but they still usually lead to professional boards of directors and eventually professional execs, where “professional” usually means “no subject matter expertise”. And hardly anybody runs a public company on customer satisfaction nowadays, unfortunately. So when I see controlling equity sold, my outlook changes from “will this go to shit?” to “when this inevitably goes to shit, will it be in the distant enough future that I don’t care or can plan for the loss?” (that being maybe a decade or so for infra, or implausibly long—like the rest of my natural life—for anything involving a community). As usual, the question remains—why does none of this seem to be priced in? I don’t know.

You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.

tptacek 3y ago

It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."

culi 3y ago
Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
- tptacek 3y ago
  If we're "honest" and "transparent", it's not a conscious strategy to sign up customers. It's just the easiest way for us to write. Meanwhile: we're a hardware-based global hosting company. We've always been externally funded. That's how you build a global hardware-backed hosting company, because servers and colocation and infra engineers are expensive. There are things that happen that disappoint customers that we care a lot about. Reliability issues several months ago absolutely fit that bill. So does hiring: we paused hiring for most of our engineering roles because we weren't happy with the experience candidates were getting. I don't know how "honest" and "transparent" we are about those things, but I do feel like when we're asked about them, we give straight answers. There are other things that happen that disappoint people that we don't care so much about. Being unhappy that we took external funding to build out our fleet and improve reliability would count as one of those things. Again with the straight answers: I wouldn't expect us to spend too much time trying to "rebound" from this announcement.
- PKop 3y ago
  >Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us Speak for yourself. Announcements of adequate funding inspires confidence fly will have longevity and resources to scale. Other concerns can be tackled in other blog posts, but nothing about the announcement of funding should inspire less confidence, what sense does that make?
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    The issue is not raising money, precisely, the issue is raising money by selling large amounts of controlling equity (as is usually the case for VC funding and IPOs, with a few notable exceptions). The purchasers will expect their money’s worth, and they will (eventually) not hesitate to exercise the control it bought them in order to get that. VCs in particular will expect much more than their money’s worth, or (most of the time) for the company to die trying to earn it, and they won’t hesitate to force the latter in pursuit of the former. This increase in variance is literally their investment model. So if VCs expect their investments to fail most of the time, and I see a company take VC money, I must have very strong reasons if I’m to disbelieve the VCs and expect the company to succeed—and I’m not following a venture investment strategy when I choose a tech supplier. IPOs are somewhat milder in their intrinsic character, but they still usually lead to professional boards of directors and eventually professional execs, where “professional” usually means “no subject matter expertise”. And hardly anybody runs a public company on customer satisfaction nowadays, unfortunately. So when I see controlling equity sold, my outlook changes from “will this go to shit?” to “when this inevitably goes to shit, will it be in the distant enough future that I don’t care or can plan for the loss?” (that being maybe a decade or so for infra, or implausibly long—like the rest of my natural life—for anything involving a community). As usual, the question remains—why does none of this seem to be priced in? I don’t know.