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I lead a platform engineering team. We have a lot of challenges that I think antithesis could help with. I’d like to try it. But… I did not know the history o

by abtinf 3y ago

I lead a platform engineering team. We have a lot of challenges that I think antithesis could help with. I’d like to try it. But… I did not know the history of foundation db until last week—specifically about the Apple acquisition and the resulting termination of client support and downloads for 5 years. So my question is, how can I trust the same founding team to not do that again? It’s one thing to get acquired by a company that would likely continue to support business users (Microsoft, IBM, AWS, even Oracle). It’s another to sell to acquirers that will likely shut down the public service (Facebook, Apple, Google). If I invest the time, money, and effort to adopt antithesis, I won’t even have the security of “well, at least we downloaded the packages before they went offline.” Maybe this is an unfair question. I think it’s great that you had a successful liquidity event with foundation. Yet I must manage risk.

wwilson 3y ago
I will let Dave and Nick chime in here if they want to, since they saw the Apple acquisition closer up than I did, but here are my views: (1) Your beliefs about what happened to FoundationDB's customers are incorrect. Everybody who had a FoundationDB license when we were acquired either got a free license to the software in perpetuity at their current levels (the free tier), or in the case of our paid customers, they were able to continue using it on an even larger scale in the future. None of our paying customers were screwed. (2) We are not aiming for an acquisition or any other kind of early exit. Our previous successes enable us to be a little bit more risk-neutral this time. (3) Even if we did vanish, what have you actually lost at this point? If your operational database gets yanked (which, I reemphasize, didn't actually happen to anybody), then you're screwed. If your exotic software testing technology gets yanked, then you're literally exactly where you are today. Doesn't seem like as big a risk to me. Apologies if my answers here were not diplomatic or whatever, but I try to be very direct about this stuff. EDIT: Actually let me add a number (4) We have validated that people are willing to pay for Antithesis, and we have a growing business being built. To the extent we're an attractive acquisition target, it's likely to be due to the strength of our business and their desire to scale it out / make it more widely available, and not simply to improve the internal tech stack of an acquirer internally. BTW, one example of an FDB customer that was still a small startup when we were acquired was Snowflake. They obviously had no problems continuing to grow and use FDB, as they still use FoundationDB as their core metadata storage today and have since they started working with us.
- abtinf 3y ago
  Thank you for explaining point 1. My brief googling of the issue led me to find mostly loud, angry voices, none of which mentioned these facts. This completely changes my evaluation. Regarding point 3, I agree that the software would be in a higher quality state even if the testing framework disappears. However, fully adopting this framework likely means integrating and explaining it in our processes and compliance documentation (my company provides services to financial institutions). I appreciate your directness. Thanks.
- SloopJon 3y ago
  > If your exotic software testing technology gets yanked, then you're literally exactly where you are today. As someone testing concurrent/distributed software, Antithesis is potentially useful to me. It would be a substantial investment to build test infrastructure around it, with a very big opportunity cost if it wasn't successful, or disappeared after an acquisition. If this exotic technology is more than a toy, I wouldn't be so cavalier about its long term prospects.
  - geodel 3y ago
    Well, thats the price of implementing very new technology. When risk appetite is less people can always go with established large vendors.
  - wwilson 3y ago
    That's true. And it's also true that investing heavily would take time, and the more time goes on the less likely we are to be acquired or disappear (or for the acquisition to be by somebody who wants to resell this as I note above). In that sense, you have a lot of optionality/convexity on this bet. In the meantime, you can use it right now to solve your problems without a ton of integration. We have customers at every level of the spectrum from "sending us unmodified output of their CI system" to "deeply integrating with our SDKs". If the former are seeing value, you can too, and your risk is genuinely minimal.
    - rockwotj 3y ago

by abtinf 3y ago

wwilson 3y ago

I will let Dave and Nick chime in here if they want to, since they saw the Apple acquisition closer up than I did, but here are my views: (1) Your beliefs about what happened to FoundationDB's customers are incorrect. Everybody who had a FoundationDB license when we were acquired either got a free license to the software in perpetuity at their current levels (the free tier), or in the case of our paid customers, they were able to continue using it on an even larger scale in the future. None of our paying customers were screwed. (2) We are not aiming for an acquisition or any other kind of early exit. Our previous successes enable us to be a little bit more risk-neutral this time. (3) Even if we did vanish, what have you actually lost at this point? If your operational database gets yanked (which, I reemphasize, didn't actually happen to anybody), then you're screwed. If your exotic software testing technology gets yanked, then you're literally exactly where you are today. Doesn't seem like as big a risk to me. Apologies if my answers here were not diplomatic or whatever, but I try to be very direct about this stuff. EDIT: Actually let me add a number (4) We have validated that people are willing to pay for Antithesis, and we have a growing business being built. To the extent we're an attractive acquisition target, it's likely to be due to the strength of our business and their desire to scale it out / make it more widely available, and not simply to improve the internal tech stack of an acquirer internally. BTW, one example of an FDB customer that was still a small startup when we were acquired was Snowflake. They obviously had no problems continuing to grow and use FDB, as they still use FoundationDB as their core metadata storage today and have since they started working with us.

abtinf 3y ago
Thank you for explaining point 1. My brief googling of the issue led me to find mostly loud, angry voices, none of which mentioned these facts. This completely changes my evaluation. Regarding point 3, I agree that the software would be in a higher quality state even if the testing framework disappears. However, fully adopting this framework likely means integrating and explaining it in our processes and compliance documentation (my company provides services to financial institutions). I appreciate your directness. Thanks.
SloopJon 3y ago
> If your exotic software testing technology gets yanked, then you're literally exactly where you are today. As someone testing concurrent/distributed software, Antithesis is potentially useful to me. It would be a substantial investment to build test infrastructure around it, with a very big opportunity cost if it wasn't successful, or disappeared after an acquisition. If this exotic technology is more than a toy, I wouldn't be so cavalier about its long term prospects.
- geodel 3y ago
  Well, thats the price of implementing very new technology. When risk appetite is less people can always go with established large vendors.
- wwilson 3y ago
  That's true. And it's also true that investing heavily would take time, and the more time goes on the less likely we are to be acquired or disappear (or for the acquisition to be by somebody who wants to resell this as I note above). In that sense, you have a lot of optionality/convexity on this bet. In the meantime, you can use it right now to solve your problems without a ton of integration. We have customers at every level of the spectrum from "sending us unmodified output of their CI system" to "deeply integrating with our SDKs". If the former are seeing value, you can too, and your risk is genuinely minimal.
  - rockwotj 3y ago