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Comment by OriginalMrPink | Hacker News Reader

I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific what I don't like about their communication.

"$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

"There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb."

I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.

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> We’re all adults here, we can talk about this stuff, right?

proceeds to not really talk about it

What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as a customer.

as the OP says:

> but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

You get that there's a whole section of this post headlined "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money", right?

yes and I reread it a few times in case I was missing something. I even turned my adblocker off in case it was removing the section that answers OP's questions but it didn't appear.

It's obviously perfectly fine if you don't want to or can't answer those questions and nobody is owed answers to them.

Just, you're known for a straight talking style so the omission is conspicuous.

I honestly don't know what it is you're looking to hear. We said what we're using the money for: hardware, rolling out more regions, and a bunch more support and infra engineers.

you are telling us what fly will be spending the money on.

what OP is asking is, what did the investors receive in exchange for giving fly the money.

Stock.

this might be the weirdest conversation I've ever had on this weird site.

I think the we give you stock, you give us money, we spend that money hiring is the a pretty common event.

yes very common. therefore it's highly unlikely to be what OP is asking about.

by this point, it's hard not to conclude that OriginalMrPink and I are being wilfully misunderstood here.

OP is interested in more details about the deal, particularly what power the investors might have, to ascertain for himself to what extent the investment might change the business.

Probably given a board seat, but usually the exact terms of a round are covered under NDA.

OP is very clearly able to make some guesses himself, as he does so in his comments.

"Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money" doesn't answer any of the questions above. I've seen private equity rounds disguised as traditional founding rounds, which is neither very transparent, nor very honest. Raising 70M just shortly after a 25M round makes me feel like there was more at play then just 'raising' money tbh. But I might be totally off here - but therefore disclosing a bit more than you currently do might be really helpful.

None of this makes any sense. No PE firm buys a company like Fly.io. I honestly don't understand what either of you are getting at, but I'm confident when I say "you're way off".

Really? What are you going to tell them after they signed? "You bought it, suckers!"

You might have found your audience. But for me the tonality of the post felt way off.

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