I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives.
However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype.
I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories.
Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are.
[1] The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle | Hacker News. (2019, December 02). Retrieved from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523
https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com...
Edit: I was an early CoreOS employee who was the first "boomerang"
On the positive side, you've got the fact that they made it to a profitable exit, which would be hard to ignore if you had a financial stake in the venture. You've got the implication that Red Hat believed that CoreOS was essential to its fortunes in a container-oriented future as a clear vote of confidence that they built something good. The fact that Red Hat kept CoreOS going suggests that they felt it was so good that their existing technology couldn't realistically catch up.
On the negative side, if you don't like Red Hat then, yeah, that certainly counts as selling out.
And since Red Hat kept Container Linux/CoreOS open source, this wasn't really a move to eliminate competition. They can support enterprise clients, but the open source nature doesn't stop another company from offering their own enterprise support.
Depends on the acquisition price. Acquihires are failures. Investors might get their money back, and everyone else (including founders) walks away with nothing but a job at some company they didn’t necessarily want to work for.
Here are some more links if you're interested: https://blog.jessfraz.com/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill
* Edit: Rephrased from "O.G. Sun Engineer", I don't know how accurate "O.G. systems engineer is", it's all relative anyway. For reference, I I'd consider Jess an "O.G. containerization engineer" :)
From Bryan's linked blog post - he joined Sun in the mid-90's. Sun was founded in 1982, so he was an (excellent) engineer there, but not one the "O.G.s"
He's not that old!
Uhh, you mean computers?
[1] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/predictive-cpu-isolation...
However, that's at the OS level. What can realistically be done at the hardware level? It must be possible in theory to design a CPU that's better at this kind of context switching, but I don't know if a new "computer company" really wants to go there.
Not for a long while.
The other folks though, I have no idea.
I worked for such a CEO. In the first year we had four week-long retreats to: an island in WA state, Palm springs, Austin, and Banff (that's where the stats team was). TONS of swag. Aeron chairs. New MBPros. Oh, and champagne fridays. Needless to say it burned through it's good will seed round in 1 year, and the CEO begged for another year's worth of money from friends before shuttering. But hey, hype sells in the software world.
I am not an expert in the field, but I work at a place that is very resistant to cloud solutions for certain applications, and getting the same stuff working on prem can be difficult and pricey.
Trips are pretty silly though.
It's such a thankless job and one that has a specific skillset that is fairly rare. You can be the Founder but not the CEO; something people seem to forget in this business.
Off the top of my head of what would be required besides just cheap hardware. 1) Cloud like software to manage it or k8s native support. I don't know exactly how that would be done, but the administrative costs of using this hardware can't be so high as to make the cloud a more viable option. 2) Some options for network access. Cloud does not just provide VM's but the underlying reliable network with multiple redundant pipes. Comcast Internet access might be good enough, but some customers might require large redundant pipes. While they might NOT need to solve this themselves, they should make sure that the market does provide solutions that when taken into account, allows for cheaper than cloud solutions. 3) Physical location... same as item 2 but for physical location of the hardware.
I remember back in the day managing colos. It really sucked. It was not just hardware costs that sucked. They should just consider that.
This is exactly how any "WeWork" type company sucks in investors. You'd just ignore the stupid out of hand except that it would be so nice to believe that if this company is on the level and IF their product does what they say it will and IF they deliver it in a reasonable time frame then it will solve the problem and somehow make money for investors.
Forget the names and reputations of the people involved... if three random people came up to you at a conference and said "We've formed a company to solve problem X!", wouldn't you wait until they showed an actual product to even think about potentially making decisions based on what they might do?
Just moved from AWS to Vultr & DO and it's loads cheaper and faster for my use case (lightweight landing pages basically).
Managed services are still incredibly tough because of client support, and like you said, relational databases and key-value stores.
Another overlooked benefit of building your own hardware is you don’t need to add complex overhead like virtualization or containers. You can “right size” each server with the perfect amount of CPU, IO and RAM for the processes you will run on it. Paired with a kernel compiled specifically for that server, your businesses applications will be vastly more performant than ones running on a cloud platform.
Honestly, too many businesses hop on the latest fads. The smart ones see the value in going back to the basics.
Cloud vendors don't have 90% profit margins; the cost of cloud is what it is because operating computers at scale is hard.
Maybe sometime in the future when I have time I can go through these long-form types of content, but they say nothing about what they're building on their landing page/don't describe in the level of detail I'm assuming they have in their podcasts.
Similar to what you're saying, it's like buying the swag for a company that doesn't exist.
Kinda interesting ofc, but how many enterprises actually need something like this? If there was an actual perceived need for datacenter equipment to be designed (and hardware-software co-designed) on the "rack scale", we would probably be doing it right and running mainframe hardware for everything.
Believe it or not, going private but not having to give up the niceties of AWS or Azure would be quite appealing.
Which has the side effect of their solutions being bespoke, because acceptable cost looks like "Tell me when I need to stop adding zeros to make this happen."
To go another way you either (1) need to be Amazon-scale already (i.e. "there aren't enough zeros to make inefficiency worth our time") or (2) be willing to say no to huge profits out of ideological purity.
The well-funded client / custom trap is real.
"...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever."
I think that's a good summary description.
In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.
Or "I bought a rack full of Oxide and now I have my own puddle of elastic compute on-premises." (If you condense a small cloud, you get a puddle, I presume.)
If hardware is involved it would seem like the latter. In which case they'll be competing with Amazon's on-premises solution and commodity hardware.
What they did with Nitro is develop custom PCIe devices to handle storage and networking, so these devices' virtual functions (SR-IOV) are directly passed through to the VMs and now the hypervisor basically has nothing to do other than switching contexts.
I'm afraid what people mean by that statement and what the startup is going to try to do are completely different things. As in people mean AWS-like cloud services running on multiple servers they control with all the fault tolerance and geographically distributed. But for the startup it probably means cloud services running on expensive servers in a fast local network.
Imagine you and your friends excitedly announcing on your personal homepages that you are setting out to build your passion project into a going concern “not driven by power or greed, but by accomplishment and self-fulfillment” [1] and being flooded in a community of supposed hackers with derision that your post wasn’t a good enough press release.
For some people, the actual human excitement of friends earnestly getting together to build something new primarily because they want to see it in the world is so foreign that they can only snark about it.
Hopefully that kind of response vindicates their values more than it demoralizes.
[1]: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-wi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Plenty of teams that seem good end up producing nothing. Announcements like this are a huge red flag to people who have seen this pattern many times over.
Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project.
In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.
Considering you literally haven’t been told — let alone allowed to use — what they’ve built, that sounds like a reasonable prior.
That being said, I wonder if the forcing factor behind building their own servers for the big three companies was mostly the inability to get hardware fast enough. Sure, there are tons of other benefits you get after you start building your own servers, but I wonder if they would have been pursued if Dell could land servers on time. In this sense, building your own machines is a much smaller scale to try to supply chain your way around, even if you're Google. That and private companies can be much more agile since they don't have to support existing workloads. Hard drive shortage? Change the spec last minute to not rely on them. This is pretty exciting to see, and there are plenty of third party vendors making money in the space, but they seem to want to revolutionize the space, and I'm curious to see how that happens.
My guess is they want to sell servers with a first class control plane. Something much less clunky than what's currently possible to cobble together with IPMI, PXE, Intel ME, grub, etc. Similar to what AWS, GCP, etc, use internally. And maybe expanding into routers based on these servers, also with a control plane, etc.
I'm extrapolating a lot out of little though. They are very vague.
I wouldn't compare the venture in question at all to 'Color'...
These are all serious people, and the first two have reputations built on strong technical contributions to (even ignoring the wild overuse of k8s for resume-driven-development) complex technical products.
But no we hear how excited they are and their fifty points defining what company they want to be. If the company's product is top secret then why share anything at all?
It's baby steps all the way at this phase.
Cantrill and Frazelle both have created software used by millions.
And yet here they are building a sever hardware company??
> That's like saying Carmack was just trying to cash out his Facebook fame.
Thats an absurd analogy. Carmack is responsible for arguably the most important advancements in video game design. Specifically for code he personally architected and wrote.
For example - Frazelle is one of 1300 contributors (currently 13th in terms of # of commits) to Docker core. Not to diminish her contribution, but these individuals are contributors, not single handed creators (which was implied), of "software used by millions".
For the record - I enjoy Frazelle's content and personality. I wish her the best, but the commentary here is near cultish.
I think they have some merit and know a thing or two about computers.
The general criticisms here are warranted and I think are constructive enough that they'd be beneficial to these founders and others seeking to do something similar.
A track record means, at bottom, that they had no disqualifying traits.
https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-...
Joyent was acquired by Samsung, and it's not one of the bullshit acquisitions that destroys the projects/products — Samsung is now using Manta/Triton (and ZFS on illumos/SmartOS) at their massive, massive scale.
The main thing to understand is that it's a global optimization, not something stupid like supporting particular PR campaigns.
There is also something about well-off individuals taking investment money to get a fancy office rather then bootstrapping and keeping all the equity/destiny of the company themselves that smells funny to me. I guess its "free money" but I have to wonder if the products would be better if it was sweat equity instead.
Based on the description of the company, they are working on hardware.
I'd agree with your statement if this was a pure software company, but anything involving tangible products can require initial capital orders of magnitude more than what 3 engineers are worth..
Read up before you make unfounded claims
Yet there's essentially nothing about what the product is (that being the only thing most people care about). This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. Worry about the product first, last and in-between. The rest is just there to signal to us that your priorities aren't in the right place.