can someone eli5 why investors are throwing so much money at Vercel, Netlify and Gatsby?
what kind of promises are they making in exchange of the capital?
why don't more capable platforms like Render or Fly.io raise as much?
what kind of promises are they making in exchange of the capital?
why don't more capable platforms like Render or Fly.io raise as much?
Why not $150M? All these companies were founded ~4 years before Render and it takes time to build to the point where these huge valuations and funding amounts make sense (to the extent they do).
There are some neat static site generator plugins out there (simplystatic, wp2static) which can be used in localwp, an easy to use and popular local dev environment from wpengine.
People could start with a static site for free/cheap, deployed from their local env to Render, and then move to docker when their sites and dynamic needs grow. This could make it a lot easier for peeps building their audience with blogs and digital products before they get into SaaS.
The next big startup could be an application on Vercel maintained by 2 people instead of a tangle of micro services and AWS configurations maintained by 20.
It's not really something that will run your Rails backend, but it has the potential of doing a lot for creative small teams.
[1] https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/functions/serverless-functi...
Everything is a Mainframe or SAP installation under the hood somewhere, but layers and layers of API mean that product teams can mostly ignore the complexity and ship a mediocre app that is only really a frontend.
I just don’t see the valuations lining up, but I’ll probably be wrong.
I also don’t know who they get acquired by. I don’t see AWS making acquisitions like this. From what I’ve seen, it seems like they try to buy companies at lower valuations (than multiple billions).
Cloud services are one of the most profitable businesses to ever exist. There’s so much lock in and network effects. Especially with managed solutions like these.
[0] ref "red teaming at Intel", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21095977
The Innovator's Solution addresses these and other issues.
http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html: Even after correctly identifying potentially disruptive technologies, firms still must circumvent its hierarchy and bureaucracy that can stifle the free pursuit of creative ideas. Christensen suggests that firms need to provide experimental groups within the company a freer rein. "With a few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology." This autonomous organization will then be able to choose the customers it answers to, choose how much profit it needs to make, and how to run its business.
If you can hold onto control of your company and take a few million off the table, why not?
No reason why this won't change. A market leader needs to consolidate their position year-after-year. GitHub was a great acquisition AWS missed. They shouldn't want to miss the next GitHub.
For context Heroku was created in 2008 just after the housing crash. By the time they exited Facebook was still 2.5 years away from going public and a solid seed round still looked like a few hundred grand if you were a hot company (on top of the ~17k you'd get from YC).
The acquisition doesn’t have to happen at these valuations for the investors to make money. See - Liquidation preferences