Humans have weird triggers for emotions. Seeing something that benefits a group that you are not a part of but fairly equivalent to is a typical trigger, even if it does make sense to a degree. When I first saw this, as a non-YC-member, I felt pretty similar. I'm sure it's simply a business relationship in which either digital ocean is making money due to the advertising or YC is subsidizing it (though the latter is unlikely).
So it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint but I think your feelings are equally valid. I would love to see digital ocean partner with other incubators or provider offers to any start-ups in general.
We do work with a number of other incubators. DO itself is an alumni of TechStars. We have some stuff in the works with 500 Startups. We're definitely interested in working with other incubators as well. If you're involved with one, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] I'll make sure to get you to the right folks at DO.
If you're not in an incubator, check out the link I shared below. There's still a lot our customer success team can do for you.
The underlying feeling remains – I feel DO ought to offer the terms of the YC deal to startups attached to other qualified incubators.
Whether that is practical or possible is a non-trivial discussion.
Nevertheless, I believe that outcome would feel fair, and it would right what feels wrong here.
(Incidentally, we are not at this time attached to any incubators.)
If your company employs less than three people then $X amount of service provided per month.
So you aren't subsidizing anyone.
But that's not always a bad thing.
You’re a startup, and a significant percentage of the money you sent is directly given to your competitors.
Which is what’s happening here. If you’re a non-YC startup using DO, you’re directly financing your competitors.
YC isn't the end all of all, but it's starting to feel like it is becoming a mandatory part of the startup process (which is NOT ok).
Secondly, with the high attention of YC companies using the service, this may help push innovation forward for things like improved firewall and private networking, managed databases for backup and redundancy and an S3 comparable file store (thus no transfer costs).
If giving $250K to YC companies to create that demand for them to implement it, I'm all for it.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/08/digitalocean-raises-83m-ser...
Given that OP claimed the feeling will pass, I don't think "economical" quite makes sense.
1) If you feel you're funding direct competitors...we're talking about startups. More of a validation of your base idea than a real edge for the competition. It's also not horrible to know your direct competition uses the same infrastructure.
2) Otherwise...this lets DO add more customers from the group of startups, which you're in, and thus gain more experience with their typical problems and needs which should benefit you (ever so slightly).
There are startups and there are YC startups. If you've got in to YC you've probably already proven your idea and you're generating revenue - YC is about accelerating rather that actually starting after all. If you're directly competing with a YC company then this does put you at a disadvantage, especially if you're in a space where computational power is a big part of your burn.
Mind you, hasn't AWS given huge blocks of credits away to startups in lots of accelerators since forever? This isn't really a new problem for competitors.
Don't waste your time and energy worrying about what other folks have, and focus the same into achieving your goals and getting some credits won't make that big of a difference....
Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done.
Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical.
The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have been similarly slighted.