Hacker News Reader

Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that just 10 customers make up over a third of revenue for them.

Judging from pages 4-5, I'm guessing these include NYT, New Relic, Ticketmaster, Alaska Airlines, Spotify, and Github.

They mention other cloud platforms as competition, and Azure has a CDN. I doubt Github would switch anytime in the near future, but the dangers posed to smaller companies by the consolidation under giants is interesting. What happens when your competitor doesn't just try to steal your clients, but can actually just acquire them?

They also mention one risk as their dependence on AWS, a competitor, and that if all the cloud providers blackballed them, they'd be in trouble.

Those accounts aren't the big fish. Well, github possibly is. Websites are tiny, especially when your revenue is based per byte. The money is in video and downloads. Getting a fraction of Apple's or Microsoft's CDN spend for downloads is probably worth tens of millions.

I think if Amazon hasn't kicked a competitor like Netflix off of their platform, Fastly has little to worry about.

That's probably not the right analogy. Kicking someone off of your platform isn't the same as using your own platform instead of a competitors.

I'm sure Azure would welcome competitors to use their product - same way AWS welcomes Netflix. A good analogy would be Amazon switching from Oracle to AWS based solutions. In which case, they do have something to worry about.

With regard to their "what if all the cloud providers block us" issue, it's is a good indication that they're fine. (Page 30 "We rely on third-party hosting providers that may be difficult to replace.") I don't think that's a serious risk.

For the Github thing, you're right, it's a different situation.

Customers highlighted on their homepage: Alaska Air, Ticketmaster, Vimeo, Airbnb, Pinterest, NYT, Twitter, and Buzzfeed. I guess that leaves, New Relic and Github from their S1.

Though they also have several media heavy companies besides Vimeo highlighted in their case studies. Including: Wistia, A&E, iHeartMedia, Shazam, 7Digital, and FuboTV

Wouldn't that be true for many companies, even AWS possibly?

Absolutely not, 33% revenue concentration, no matter what business you are in is NOT good from an investor perspective. Super risky.

suffice it to say: a bunch of AWS features were essentially developed for the benefit of netflix. So, while it entails some risk, ultimately, yes: it's not uncommon for a handful of customers to be the 900 lb gorillas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com