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Comment by password4321 | Hacker News Reader

+ People get paid, hopefully a few even get big $.

- Investors want unicorn returns.

Good luck!

What is their actual business model? I know there's Deno Deploy, and presumably they offer some kind of enterprise-support type deal. But the first is easily copied by competitors (in an already-crowded market), and the other isn't super lucrative. Is there anything else?

I love Deno and want it to succeed, but it doesn't feel like a unicorn, and I'm worried about it being expected to become one

I feel like they have a better business plan than NPM did at least. They'll probably get acquired by one of the big cloud players.

I guess that makes some sense. Still feels like it would be a weird thing to aim for, but maybe that's the state of the industry

Pecunia non olet. If the goal is to make money, an exit via acquisition is one potential way to make money

Open source ecosystems that become big enough often end up either producing unicorns, or failing that, producing unicorn-level returns for existing companies.

There’s no guarantee that the creator of the ecosystem will be one of the unicorns, but they’re as good a bet as any other company to pull it off. VCs aren’t looking for 100% certainty, just a plausible path.

https://deno.com/deploy/pricing is their business model.

They charge you for CPU and bandwidth more than they pay for it.

Right, my point is that any number of cloud providers could swoop in and offer the same product for probably cheaper

This is generally true about every company though. Someone can always swoop in, and huge incumbents can always do it cheaper, at least in theory.

Warren Buffett only invests in companies with what he calls a "moat" that make it hard for any other company to offer a similar product or service.

Apple's moat, for example, is its institutional knowledge of design and maybe its relationships with its suppliers, e.g., their deal with TSMC to lock up most of TSMC's capacity on the 5-nm node. Another moat Apple has is consumers who do not like engaging in sysadmin battles with their consumer electronics. One of my friends, a 79-year-old woman, for example, told me once that she wouldn't consider buying a computer from any company except Apple. (I could probably induce her to change her mind on that, but it would take persistence and patient explanation on my part, and also I'm probably the only person who could change it.) The main way Apple has maintained (for 38 years!) its dominance in institutional knowledge of design is probably the fact that most of the young talented designers want to work for Apple (partly because most of the people willing to pay extra from good design in consumer electronics buy from Apple).

Google Search's moat seems to be institutional knowledge on how to build a good search engine and access to data on what people search for and which search results they click. Strengthening the latter moat is the reason they're so interesting in having all traffic from the consumer's browser encrypted: namely, so that the consumer's ISP cannot sell data on the consumer's interactions with Google's search engine to any competing search engines. Another moat Google has is that most consumers will not take the trouble to change the default choice of the search engine used when the consumer types a non-URL into the location bar of the browser. Strengthening that moat explains Google's willingness to pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine and Google's interest in giving away Chrome and Android.

Microsoft's moat: practically every organization uses computers and needs employees who know how to use those computers. They mostly choose Windows and Office because that is what most prospective employees know. In turn, when a young person improves his or her attractiveness to prospective employers by learning computer skills, they usually choose to learn Windows and Office because that is what is running on the computers of prospective employers.

The three companies alone do have these moats but are outliers of outliers. Stuff we haven’t seen much of before. Combined they are worth $5.5T. All US public companies are worth $40T. The Nasdaq that they are all in has a total market cap of all companies of under $20T. Besides the two mentioned exchanges, Shanghai, and Euronext, these three companies alone might come up 5th in total market cap. They are right alongside Tokyo and Shenzen. Definitely dwarf Hong Kong and LSE.

The other big moats off the top of my head aren’t as strong but ASML, TSMC (for now), Tencent, Baidu, Yandex, Kakao Daum, are all worthy but still peanuts comparatively. I’m sure some Indian companies too.

Facebook has a sizable moat: it is easy for me to join a new social network, but it is kind of pointless unless everyone I want to communicate with also joins, and it is hard to motivate them to do so. The fact that Facebook was not the first social network is evidence that that kind of moat can be crossed, but still it would be hard. And if a company starts getting traction, FB will probably offer to acquire it like they did Instagram and WhatsApp (which never was a social network, but might've become one by gradually adding features if it hadn't been acquired).

But I agree with your point: it is really hard for a new company to create a large revenue stream with a strong moat around it.

Also https://deno.com/deploy/subhosting

(I'd bet this will be, or already is, the more profitable side of the business.)

Considering that one of those competitors is Netlify, then either the incumbent (i.e. Netlify) is in a great position to benefit from a succeeding Deno, or Deno Deploy does succeed and Netlify can profit from that. A bunch of other participants (GitHub/Nat Friedman, Automattic) seem like they could benefit from a thriving ecosystem around Deno as well, even if Deno Deploy isn't particularly successful.

Netlify Edge Functions use Deno Deploy, as do Supabase Edge Functions. I'd imagine that's a significant part of their revenue. (I work at Netlify, but have no insight into the financials of this arrangement)

I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC

You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying

> You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing.

Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale

If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the model.

If they’re expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno?

VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the community to professional financiers. As others wrote, that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the bankruptcies.

Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc.

I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture change to work through!

Maybe they see a chance of it but they cannot seriously expect it

EDIT: the comment I responded to was completely rewritten and replaced with a different one. Please don’t do this

The main base expectations are that out of all of Sequoias bets, some will become $5B+ co's, and for the next 18mo, deno can grow headcount with salaries unrelated to sustainability

Some people involved might expect more, and I'm sure hope for more, but I'm a language designer & CEO, not a mind reader :)

They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in companies they think could be worth multiple billions.

If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company could be worth billions.

In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime because they have money to build it out.

a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact that investors continue throwing money at it

there are lots of companies, which are technically "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian and Nikola come to mind)

The VC model is not built on 10x exits. Later rounds, sure, but series A is definitely looking for larger multiplier.

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