(The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes:
1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have
2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks
Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch.
I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
There are things that happen that disappoint customers that we care a lot about. Reliability issues several months ago absolutely fit that bill. So does hiring: we paused hiring for most of our engineering roles because we weren't happy with the experience candidates were getting. I don't know how "honest" and "transparent" we are about those things, but I do feel like when we're asked about them, we give straight answers.
There are other things that happen that disappoint people that we don't care so much about. Being unhappy that we took external funding to build out our fleet and improve reliability would count as one of those things. Again with the straight answers: I wouldn't expect us to spend too much time trying to "rebound" from this announcement.
Speak for yourself. Announcements of adequate funding inspires confidence fly will have longevity and resources to scale. Other concerns can be tackled in other blog posts, but nothing about the announcement of funding should inspire less confidence, what sense does that make?
VCs in particular will expect much more than their money’s worth, or (most of the time) for the company to die trying to earn it, and they won’t hesitate to force the latter in pursuit of the former. This increase in variance is literally their investment model.
So if VCs expect their investments to fail most of the time, and I see a company take VC money, I must have very strong reasons if I’m to disbelieve the VCs and expect the company to succeed—and I’m not following a venture investment strategy when I choose a tech supplier.
IPOs are somewhat milder in their intrinsic character, but they still usually lead to professional boards of directors and eventually professional execs, where “professional” usually means “no subject matter expertise”. And hardly anybody runs a public company on customer satisfaction nowadays, unfortunately.
So when I see controlling equity sold, my outlook changes from “will this go to shit?” to “when this inevitably goes to shit, will it be in the distant enough future that I don’t care or can plan for the loss?” (that being maybe a decade or so for infra, or implausibly long—like the rest of my natural life—for anything involving a community).
As usual, the question remains—why does none of this seem to be priced in? I don’t know.
I'm really concerned that Fly's employees like yourself think availability and service uptime isn't important. I think I'll be avoiding Fly on this alone.
I'm confused, when did any of Fly's employees say as much?
ARE YOU SAYING YOU INVENTED THE OFFICE?
Ashburn is literally like the Embassy Suites next to the Five Guys, the Aloft next to the taco place, Equinix, Digital Reality, Verizon, NTT, CenturyLink, etc.
Take a look at this map here: https://www.loudoun.gov/DocumentCenter/View/171141/2022Elect...
Ashburn is not literally just one shopping plaza. It's a giant area zoned into different parts of datacenter, suburbs, and commercial sections.
Even forgetting all of this, just type "restaurants in Ashburn" into Google Maps see the plethora of results.
Just because someone has some imaginary boundary of what constitutes as Ashburn doesn't make it definitively small.