8 ms·

What does "the msft dude for YC" mean?

by jmsdnns 12y ago

grimmfang 12y ago
Companies like AWS, Google, and MSFT have representatives that consult with YC founders to help them with engineering goals. I suppose to up-sell them on scaling with their platform.
- rjbwork 12y ago
  Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. But dear god, the XML! They've started making more and more stuff code-configurable though, so that's good.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. And it's pretty expensive. Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
    - skc 12y ago
      > And it's pretty expensive. Nice blanket statement there. How can you claim it's expensive when you have no idea what or how he uses it?
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Compared to that doing a startup on an open source stack using dedicated machines eventually turns out much cheaper. It's like getting hooked on drugs. The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
    - onion2k 12y ago
      Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves. Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        You could of course simply hire freelance sysadmin/devops guys. Initially those are not full-time jobs anyway. The choice is definitely not between going for a cloud platform versus hiring a bunch of people full time. There are other options.
        gommm 12y ago
        Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves. There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        The only good use-case I know for AWS and it's ilk is if you need a 10,000 node cluster for a few hours to do some heavily compute intensive work which does not require a very large amount of data to be imported and exported afterwards. This is a pretty limited number of use cases but for those situations it absolutely rocks. Anything else I'd run the numbers very carefully.
        turnip1979 12y ago
    - gadders 12y ago
      Stack Overflow seem to be doing OK: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda... I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Just like in the case of Trello if you already have the experience you can probably save money if you use what you already know how to use. In almost all other cases open source stacks are cheaper. Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack. Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit. Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
        CHY872 12y ago
        Big names mean nothing. You are not Google, they have very different requirements to you and their scale is much larger than your startup will ever be. Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible. Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup. Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
        jacquesm 12y ago
    - wfjackson 12y ago
      >Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term. From another post by you: >Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening? Otherwise I am going to call BS on it. Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Are you actually asking me to disclose customer information and taking my (obvious) refusal to do so as calling BS? Interesting. Look, I have no skin in the game, if you're happy forking over tons of money for stuff you don't strictly speaking need then more power to you. All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know. It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
        notwedtm 12y ago
        Except you're not forced into using Microsoft SOFTWARE when using Azure. Like many others have pointed out, you are free to use Linux variants as well.
    - UK-AL 12y ago
      The biggest problem for a startup is getting out there, and getting transaction and revenue. Not penny pinching over what servers your going to use. You want to use as much pre-made stuff to give you the biggest head start as possible. When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Choosing your tech stack with care is one of the more important choices. You're locking yourself in for years to come and mistakes can be very costly to fix. Getting transactions and revenues are obviously also important, the whole trouble with doing a start-up is that you have to do so many things right.
        Spearchucker 12y ago
        If you're worried about lock-in then design for portability. Portability means using open standards rather than open source. The neat thing is that with a well-designed site or service you can switch vendors easily. Cloud is a commodity - who cares who the provider is?
        notwedtm 12y ago
        If YC has shown us anything, it's that companies can successfully pivot at nearly any point of their lifecycle and still be successful. It's also shown us that they can fail at pivoting and have it be nothing to do with the stack they chose.
    - jaegerpicker 12y ago
      You do realize that Azure has about as much to do with windows as AWS, right? I use Azure to run a completely open source stack based on node, postgres, and python. I also have a long term windows server in AWS. Azure is every bit as open as any other "cloud" based stack
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
jacquesm 12y ago
It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft. I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement. Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
- radmuzom 12y ago
  The "much" better off is an assumption. If I remember correctly, Fogcreek primarily uses a Microsoft stack; so did lot of people who used to hang around in the Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. Most of them had bootstrapped companies rather than use a lot of VC money to buy expensive tools. Most of them did quite well making money with their business. Using open tools is not a criterion for both technical or business success.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Fogcreek is run by ex microsoft people that had extensive experience with the stack before starting fogcreek, it made excellent sense for them to use what they already knew how to use.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Joel Spolsky - former Microsoft Product Manager? Yes, it's not particularly surprising that they would use Microsoft Products - their incredible familiarity with the product would offset any downstream licensing costs. Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions"). Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset. But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...
GameOfTrolls 12y ago
paid shill

What does "the msft dude for YC" mean?

by jmsdnns 12y ago

What does "the msft dude for YC" mean?

Companies like AWS, Google, and MSFT have representatives that consult with YC founders to help them with engineering goals. I suppose to up-sell them on scaling with their platform.

rjbwork 12y ago
Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. But dear god, the XML! They've started making more and more stuff code-configurable though, so that's good.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. And it's pretty expensive. Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
  - skc 12y ago
    > And it's pretty expensive. Nice blanket statement there. How can you claim it's expensive when you have no idea what or how he uses it?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Compared to that doing a startup on an open source stack using dedicated machines eventually turns out much cheaper. It's like getting hooked on drugs. The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves. Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      You could of course simply hire freelance sysadmin/devops guys. Initially those are not full-time jobs anyway. The choice is definitely not between going for a cloud platform versus hiring a bunch of people full time. There are other options.
      - gommm 12y ago
        Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves. There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        The only good use-case I know for AWS and it's ilk is if you need a 10,000 node cluster for a few hours to do some heavily compute intensive work which does not require a very large amount of data to be imported and exported afterwards. This is a pretty limited number of use cases but for those situations it absolutely rocks. Anything else I'd run the numbers very carefully.
        turnip1979 12y ago
  - gadders 12y ago
    Stack Overflow seem to be doing OK: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda... I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Just like in the case of Trello if you already have the experience you can probably save money if you use what you already know how to use. In almost all other cases open source stacks are cheaper. Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack. Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit. Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
      - CHY872 12y ago
        Big names mean nothing. You are not Google, they have very different requirements to you and their scale is much larger than your startup will ever be. Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible. Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup. Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
        jacquesm 12y ago
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    >Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term. From another post by you: >Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening? Otherwise I am going to call BS on it. Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Are you actually asking me to disclose customer information and taking my (obvious) refusal to do so as calling BS? Interesting. Look, I have no skin in the game, if you're happy forking over tons of money for stuff you don't strictly speaking need then more power to you. All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know. It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
      - notwedtm 12y ago
        Except you're not forced into using Microsoft SOFTWARE when using Azure. Like many others have pointed out, you are free to use Linux variants as well.
  - UK-AL 12y ago
    The biggest problem for a startup is getting out there, and getting transaction and revenue. Not penny pinching over what servers your going to use. You want to use as much pre-made stuff to give you the biggest head start as possible. When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Choosing your tech stack with care is one of the more important choices. You're locking yourself in for years to come and mistakes can be very costly to fix. Getting transactions and revenues are obviously also important, the whole trouble with doing a start-up is that you have to do so many things right.
      - Spearchucker 12y ago
        If you're worried about lock-in then design for portability. Portability means using open standards rather than open source. The neat thing is that with a well-designed site or service you can switch vendors easily. Cloud is a commodity - who cares who the provider is?
      - notwedtm 12y ago
        If YC has shown us anything, it's that companies can successfully pivot at nearly any point of their lifecycle and still be successful. It's also shown us that they can fail at pivoting and have it be nothing to do with the stack they chose.
  - jaegerpicker 12y ago
    You do realize that Azure has about as much to do with windows as AWS, right? I use Azure to run a completely open source stack based on node, postgres, and python. I also have a long term windows server in AWS. Azure is every bit as open as any other "cloud" based stack
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

jacquesm 12y ago

It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft. I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement. Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.

radmuzom 12y ago
The "much" better off is an assumption. If I remember correctly, Fogcreek primarily uses a Microsoft stack; so did lot of people who used to hang around in the Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. Most of them had bootstrapped companies rather than use a lot of VC money to buy expensive tools. Most of them did quite well making money with their business. Using open tools is not a criterion for both technical or business success.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Fogcreek is run by ex microsoft people that had extensive experience with the stack before starting fogcreek, it made excellent sense for them to use what they already knew how to use.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Joel Spolsky - former Microsoft Product Manager? Yes, it's not particularly surprising that they would use Microsoft Products - their incredible familiarity with the product would offset any downstream licensing costs. Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions"). Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset. But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...

GameOfTrolls 12y ago

paid shill