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There isn't an obvious line from "save 30% on your hosting bill" to "grow by 8% this week", which suggests that it isn't terribly high on YC's list of prioritie

by patio11 12y ago

There isn't an obvious line from "save 30% on your hosting bill" to "grow by 8% this week", which suggests that it isn't terribly high on YC's list of priorities. I can think of a few YC companies with notable infrastructure requirements but for many of them it's below the noise floor.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
I'd be interested in the yearly/3-year cost data of infrastructure based on a VC's total tech portfolio. I can't believe it to be insignificant. If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.
- mechanical_fish 12y ago
  The fully-loaded cost of a full-time Rails programmer is, let's say, $15k per month. An Amazon m3.large with 7.5GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD costs $64 per month if I reserve a year in advance. (And why wouldn't I, given that the proposed alternative is to buy hardware?) If I wave the magic wand and save 30% on the cost of each m3.large, I save $19 per month per instance. If my company runs the equivalent of twenty m3.large instances per programmer, 24 hours a day, for a whole year, my magic-wand-powered savings will add up to six additional programmer workdays - about $4600 per programmer. If I start out on January 1 with a year of runway, I'll go broke on January 9 of next year instead of January 1. So, even if I were to believe in the existence of magic wands, they wouldn't make much of a difference.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    You're raining on my thought experiment :)
- patio11 12y ago
  If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware. I am aware of many companies where advertising, conferences (throwing their own), laptops/mice/etc, rent, general office overhead, credit card processing, and about five other things I'm forgetting are still higher than infrastructure/hardware, in addition to direct costs of employment. (Obviously, less true if you run Dropbox, but COGS is looooooooooow in most SaaS companies for a reason.)

by patio11 12y ago

toomuchtodo 12y ago

I'd be interested in the yearly/3-year cost data of infrastructure based on a VC's total tech portfolio. I can't believe it to be insignificant. If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.

mechanical_fish 12y ago
The fully-loaded cost of a full-time Rails programmer is, let's say, $15k per month. An Amazon m3.large with 7.5GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD costs $64 per month if I reserve a year in advance. (And why wouldn't I, given that the proposed alternative is to buy hardware?) If I wave the magic wand and save 30% on the cost of each m3.large, I save $19 per month per instance. If my company runs the equivalent of twenty m3.large instances per programmer, 24 hours a day, for a whole year, my magic-wand-powered savings will add up to six additional programmer workdays - about $4600 per programmer. If I start out on January 1 with a year of runway, I'll go broke on January 9 of next year instead of January 1. So, even if I were to believe in the existence of magic wands, they wouldn't make much of a difference.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  You're raining on my thought experiment :)
patio11 12y ago
If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware. I am aware of many companies where advertising, conferences (throwing their own), laptops/mice/etc, rent, general office overhead, credit card processing, and about five other things I'm forgetting are still higher than infrastructure/hardware, in addition to direct costs of employment. (Obviously, less true if you run Dropbox, but COGS is looooooooooow in most SaaS companies for a reason.)