Re:What it's like to bootstrap a business before it can fina...
by lsc on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @05:23PM
(#21875344)
Yup. We had a pretty good (20%) discount if you paid for a year up front that customers often used, so it wasn't slow to save up the cash, but it serialized a lot of processes that could have been parallelized. Testing one server well takes a few days. Testing 100 servers well takes a few days.
I mean, there certainly was also a time aspect that was independent of that serialization, but a lot of that was also saving money. I mean, I personally argue that buying servers from parts is less time than negotiating a good deal on an assembled server, but we certainly could have gotten tested servers out faster if we were willing to shovel more money at someone. Maybe even if we still serialized the purchase.
Re:What it's like to bootstrap a business before it can fina...
by t34543 on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @06:57PM
(#21875764)
Sounds like similar challenges with hosting companies. Huge capital float and long payback period.
If you were selling/leasing compute commodities you were probably more of a logistics company vs tech.
> I was building servers one at a time, using the money from the first to pay for the next one.
Is that they were financing the purchase of each new server with the money that they got paid by their customers. So they had to wait a certain amount of time until they had enough money to build each new server. If instead they had bought multiple servers at once, on credit, they could have started serving more customers much faster.