Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.
Though to be fair, even if render collapsed overnight, I think I’d still be equally satisfied after moving to fly.
From the perspective of a recent founder, it's downright spooky to build around any SaaS, considering how few of them have been around for 10+ years, when that is certainly what our business is aiming for.
I know (and share the feels): Devs tend to get excited about the new thing – but if Google Workspace shut down next month, we would be in so much operational trouble. When other peoples fancies stand in the way of the entire operation you are responsible for, it actually begs the question how much closed source SaaS you can allow before it starts to be quite frankly irresponsible.
We are not imagining things. SaaS of all sizes shut down all the time, and when you are heavily relying on them and building software around them to run a business the prospect is spooky as hell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32955520
If they are a multiplier for a whole portfolio, there's not much reason for any particular branch to purchase them.
(This post seems like some evidence they might actually be building the wrong thing, though.)
I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.
Are there any examples where the capitalism bottom line is ignored and a company keeps growing with extremely premium generous acquisition offers on the table? I can't think of any, but there could be a few. However, I expect it's pretty rare.
For companies with such tremendous growth, the venture capitalist firms are primarily looking to make their <big-multiplier> return and push priorities accordingly (understandably).
The only constant in life is change, it's best to focus on what you can do right now, today, and only put out promises or commitments that you have the necessary influence to follow through on. Some things are bigger than each of us.
Best wishes and godspeed to you and fly.io!
I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money.
Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective.
It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m still very skeptical of them not being bought out in 10 years.
What you want to know is the probability of a small, independent, high quality provider remaining independent, high quality and not bankrupt.
It does seem to be rare in the tech space, especially in the US. Becoming one of the largest public corporations on earth is one way to do it, as you suggested, but the odds of that happening are miniscule.
Except Valve I guess, but that was never a public company that could be acquired to satisfy investors in the first place.