Does anyone know how the failure rate of startups based on internal tools, stacks up against the failure rate of startups at large?
FogBugz DID start as an internal tool, which was more profitable than Trello (pre-Atlassian), but it’s going to turn 25 this year. Don’t make business decisions based on software that could register as an antique, if it were a car.
They are many AWS products that are a derivative or variation of internal tools, but they are effectively almost always rewrites with significant changes. The dogfooding comes much later.
Source: I once worked there while they were migrating workloads to these AWS systems.
It's also on the Wikipedia page, with references to the appropriate articles/talks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...
This is not some secret or hidden piece of knowledge requiring extensive research..
EC2 was sold to customers long before it was functional and secure enough for Amazon itself to use.
> EC2 was developed first and foremost for Amazon's internal infrastructure. It started out as an idea in the head of Chris Pinkham, who worked as an engineer in charge of Amazon's global infrastructure in the early 2000s.
> "It struck us in the infrastructure engineering organisation that we really needed to decentralise the infrastructure by providing services to development teams," Pinkham says. "That was a big motivating factor."
Someone here is lying. I really couldn't care less who's right or wrong, I'm just using publicly available information.
This is probably the case for 99% of all arguments I witnessed in my career.
GP and myself are in agreement that the widely understood history is as I laid it out (given they said it was a myth). Happy to link to some info on the history of AWS, but its not the point of this thread I think
On the business side, Amazon externalized every little piece of its retail business into a product, from the website itself (target.com), 3P sellers, FBA, etc.
They are well funded, but do they actually make money? Seems like the odd one out in your list.
Also note that I'm not claiming they are never good ideas, so pointing out instances where they've panned out isn't very interesting. It'd be more interesting if you could show that the hit rate among these types of startups is better than I'm suggesting (for that we need to consider the denominator).
But I got carried away with trying to recall all the companies that started out as internal tools, that I forgot
Not sure hit rate is anywhere close to the statistic to measure startups by either. Successful ones are called Unicorns for a reason.