Redis Labs Raises $100M
redislabs.com
redislabs.com
That said, being overcapitalized is perniciously corrupting. I saw first hand what happens when there's too much money floating inside a company. Malinvestment is an issue at the company level just as much as at the macroeconomic level.
Management starts acting like trust fund kids, forgetting that, one day, the money might run out, and making a profit is the only sustainable way to run a company.
As much as there are examples from history of companies that have blown venture capital on stupid things, I think Redis Labs has a good shot at reaching the holy grail of an IPO.
Pricy, and worth every penny.
Made my life so much easier
Click a few buttons it gives me an URL to point my apps at.
Now and then I’d get an email, hey instance X needs more memory, click here to see what’s going on, or just drag the slider to a higher plan.
Worked great, Hardest part was giving good names so I could remember what each instance was for.
My guess is that fast growth + $35-40MM in current ARR should have sufficed.
Just my 0.02.
For a founder, that way is runway. The founder who is terrified about the company's future, will raise a lot of money to not think about that future. Money buys them time and time buys them distance. A clean, safe separation from reality where unpleasant voices like "do we have product market fit?" or "is our moat large enough?" can be ignored or saved for "later". A "later" that seems further and further away depending on the money raised.
Overcapitalization, in that sense, is meant as a security blanket, not a safety net. In that sense, the complacency and eventual corruption of the organization derives from the need for safety that executives and their managers subconsciously & naturally prioritize above all else.
On that note, I'm curious how Slack will fare over the next few years.
It’s not a bet that the product will be profitable and successful—that should be a given. It’s a bet on the company becoming the leader in a huge market.
That said, your larger point still holds :) And of course raising the stakes this way can also increase the risk of ruin.
https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise-software/overview/
I started using KeyDB and the project is great. I'm more inclined to support the tech they are integrating that check things off my Redis wishlist such as Active-Active replication and true multi-core support (not just IO treads).
I see what you did there.
I see what you did there
They will probably spend this money on consolidation. Buying up people who provide complementary tools or extensions, maybe a couple that were previously agnostic.
Nebulous claims like cloud neutrality don’t pay the bills and I have not really seen businesses jump from one cloud to another seamlessly, no matter the software.
https://redislabs.com/partner/aws/
as they sell it, obviously some organizations are buying it, so those orgs must find the AWS option "not good enough". is it possible that AWS will continue to improve it? yes, but presumably Redis Labs will also continue to improve their solution.
You mean in such a way that Amazon cannot "productize" them, right? Surely you can host them on AWS if you're setting it up yourself.
If you installed Redis on an EC2 instance manually you could run the modules.
Did you look at Aerospike? It has transactions, persistence, replication and is fault tolerant.
Without VC funding, an open source project is a success if it is useful to the devs and provides a comfortable income to the maintainers. Basically, a "lifestyle" business.
With VC funding, the goal now becomes generating huge returns or failing fast, which is fundamentally at odds with a good open source project. Thus the pressure comes to either aggressively monetize the project, or else to get it acquired by someone.
The fact that cloud providers are built on repackaging open source solutions and that the authors have no equity is one of my biggest disappointments in the modern tech world.
My feelings are made worse by the fact that we seem to be building more walled gardens, forgetting the original intent and ethos of the web.
It's wealth for the few on the backs of free labor provided by our best luminaries.
And then they don't give us the keys. We have to pay rent.
Ugh, I hate it so much.
We need stronger copyleft. And we need to stop contributing our time and resources to open source that isn't equitable to the authors.
To be honest, your comment reads as if you think building a company such as Redis Labs is easy. Even with a tool like Redis freely available, it's hard and risky.
I understand the sentiment better with eg Amazon taking some open source, putting a sticker on it, and using their market dominance to extract free money from it. But that's not what Redis Labs is at all.
CockRoachDB followed suit and implemented the same.
https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The GPL and AGPL require reciprocity but do not disallow commercial forks. Other licenses out there may disallow commerical forks, but they are not Open Source licenses.
Maybe he has equity, maybe not. I hope he does. But a company profiting off of Redis without contributing back is a very conscious choice by the author and not at all the fault of weak copyright enforcement.
If they didn't offer automatically provisioned tools users would still use those tools, they'd have to set them up manually or using their own automation.
I really love the BSD concept, but on a dark night when I'm feeling morose, I wonder if the way my thoughts on public policy are skewed, in the same way that we say that people who vote for taxes on themselves suffer from a delusion of being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.
I want the option to build myself a business out of Open Software, even though it looks now like I may only do that once in my lifetime. But so do a lot of people who are much, much more selfish than I am.
I’m not sure if he does. That post is interesting - I didn’t know he was stepping away.
> So, dear Redis community, today I’m stepping back as the Redis maintainer. My new position will be, on one side, an “ideas” person at Redis Labs, in order to provide inputs for new Redis possibilities: I’ll continue to be part of the Redis Labs advisory board.
Maybe I am wrong to jump to this conclusion, though.
> Redis Labs - home of Redis [logo and motto]
I like Redis Labs, but: this wording is misleading and inaccurate.
@antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo), the creator of Redis, joined them in 2015 [0]; however, he left recently. That's the only claim they can use to somehow be seen as the "home" of Redis, but it is still a very weird claim.
What's the home of an open source project?
My personal perception is that they shouldn't word things this way; I might be mistaken, or at least other people might see it differently. What's your take?
Again, to be clear: I have nothing against the company - I actually like and admire them and @antirez. I just don't want them to get down the rabbit hole of corporate jargon and marketing BS (see what happened with New Relic, as an example).
[0]: https://redislabs.com/press/redis-creator-salvatore-sanfilip...
http://antirez.com/news/133 -- The end of the Redis adventure
The exception to your rule that I'll mention is that sometimes PE firms will buy a company and reopen it after it stops operating, but that's pretty rare.
I know one example: NXP Semiconductors. Got spun out of Philips, along with all the Philips cultural baggage (which means high bureaucracy and low productivity). A PE firm bought it, kept yelling about the bottom line for years on end, and everybody started cutting away waste, ineffective people (the "human furniture") got fired, prestige projects that had no economic value got killed, and they started shipping.
I'm sure it's not all been roses and sunshine but last I checked, NXP is a better company than when they were a part of Philips.
I’m not sure why Redis Enterprise needs so many different price levels. If Redis were priced like DynamoDB, there would be much less friction for folks like me to sign up. Right now it’s like all the other cloud database companies: want to use our database? Great! Calculate your storage needs in advance and convert that into our measure of choice (different for each provider)
“Redis Labs, the provider of a database management system, has raised USD60 million in Series E funding round to accelerate the delivery of the most efficient database to the world. The funding was led by Francisco Partners, a leading private equity firm. With this funding round, Redis Labs’ valuation has now reached USD146 million.” - https://ciotechie.com/news/redis-labs-gets-usd60-million-in-...
If the 146M is post-money, then they own (60/146M)%? If it's pre-money, (60/(60+146M))%?
PE investments are very different. They are probably going to either slim/trim or focus on some core money-making part of the business and then sell/breakup/flip the business in a couple of years. The portfolio stats are totally different from VC.
https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/advantages/
> Redis Enterprise is a robust in-memory database platform built by the people who develop open source Redis. It maintains the simplicity and high performance of Redis, while adding many enterprise-grade capabilities, such as linear scaling to hundreds of millions of operations per second, Active-Active geo-replication with local latency, Redis on Flash to tier data across dynamic and persistent memory and solid-state disk (SSD) to reduce total cost of ownership, and five-nines (99.999%) uptime based on built-in durability and single-digit-seconds failover. Redis Enterprise supports many data modeling methods with modules such as RediSearch, RedisJSON, RedisGraph, RedisTimeSeries, RedisBloom, and RedisAI, and allows operations to be executed across and between modules and core Redis functionality using RedisGears, a serverless engine that runs across shards and nodes of Redis Enterprise cluster. All this while keeping database latency under one millisecond, so your application can respond instantaneously. Learn how to implement the best in-memory database: Redis Enterprise.
That said, theres equal if not greater motivation for this hypothetical contributor to raise their own $100mm and compete with Redis Labs.
- professional support
- proprietary modules for Redis
- advice on integrating Redis into their legacy systems
When I, as a developer, have an issue with some open source code, I spend some amount of time fixing it (labor cost), and some amount of time with a broken system (downtime). But it's not a big deal for me, if I spend 30 minutes troubleshooting a problem. Scale that up to a company with thousands of employees, and those can be big costs.
I am saying that source code licenses are irrelevant to support and operations costs.
Both RedHat and Microsoft will sell you a support contract.
I've personally mostly used it as a message broker (celery in python, resque in ruby), but it can definitely be used as a database.
Bottom line, it's a very flexible tool, and can be more than "just a cache".
> I've personally mostly used it as a message broker
Did you geo replicate message broker?
Maybe, I actually have no idea, have you seen numbers?
> Their valuation reflects its use as a cache
How so?
> Did you geo replicate message broker?
No
I'm really intrigued by the concept of a multimode database. I'd love to hear from anybody who is doing this in practice. I run a document, sql, and graph db strung together with pub/sub. All in one definitely seems appealing but I'm trying to size up downsides, what migration work would be needed, and what integrations may break (especially SQL).
"I've got an existing product that I know enterprises want to buy. For every $50K I put into consultative sales, I'll sign a client whose LTV is $500K. Therefore, if I raise $100M for 10% of the company, I can hire more salespeople, increase the future earnings of the company by $1B, and hence all our existing shareholders will be better off and so will the new investor." Repeat until the target market is saturated, which for software startups can be a long way off.
This is why SaaS startups usually run at negative profits, even after they go public, and yet the majority of public investors still continually undervalue them (as in their value goes up over time). You have a machine where you put in $X and get back $5-10X over time, but the time period is usually many years. It makes sense to feed the machine with as much $$ as you have, and oftentimes some $$ that you don't have.
Ugh, this economy.
You can say that about a lot of products on the market, and yet this magical team never rears its head.