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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Many congrats Vercel! I've been a big fan since Zeit platform version 1 - I remember the transition to platform version 2 was difficult but over time I can see how incredible of a platform you've become.

Just a note from a fan - I hope you all can determine a way to approach the future with longevity and corporate independence. The web really needs your entire teams dedication towards performance, end user experience, and developer experience in the coming years. I would love to see Vercel as an independent entity a decade from now and witness how your philosophy changes the web in that time!

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> avoid being acquired

Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.

> Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company.

not a very intellectually honest statement to make considering founder supervoting shares are extremely common in tech.

extremely common, common, or merely not that unusual?

I don’t actually know, but I was struck by the hyperbole in a comment essentially complaining about hyperbole.

How long will that persist? Any such company has no chance of being included in e.g. S&P 500 so there's clearly strong pressure in the opposite direction...

Who cares about being in the S&P 500? It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else.

> It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else

If trillions of tracking dollars with a measurable boost on valuation and trading [1] and thus a measurable reduction in the cost of capital [2] is “nothing else,” then yes.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138641810...

[2] https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/130246

> Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company

only if all shares have equal voting rights.

Which is the case for the vast majority of IPOs

MSFT/GitHub would be an epic acquisitor for Vercel.

100% agree on that.

Heroku was acquired. I'm not sure there were any major issues.

It wasn't a "transition". They straight up killed features that would never work on 2, that worked on 1. For example, websockets. Turns out you can't do those in their ephemeral lambda model.

There are a variety of solutions for realtime w/ serverless: https://vercel.com/docs/solutions/realtime

All the proposed solutions required a third party service or am I reading it wrong?

It is always the same, you want database use a third party, you want websockets use a third party, this approach turns out to be very expensive if you are starting

It is the same for authentication, file uploads, emails, crons, it is a burden to handle all that externally

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