Why not $150M? All these companies were founded ~4 years before Render and it takes time to build to the point where these huge valuations and funding amounts make sense (to the extent they do).
You're the only service apart of AWS and DO I'm aware of where I can host WordPress and static sites using the same account and dashboard. It's not the sexiest tech stack for Startups, but a WP plugin for static site generation and docker deploys (pro plan) would be killer.
There are some neat static site generator plugins out there (simplystatic, wp2static) which can be used in localwp, an easy to use and popular local dev environment from wpengine.
People could start with a static site for free/cheap, deployed from their local env to Render, and then move to docker when their sites and dynamic needs grow. This could make it a lot easier for peeps building their audience with blogs and digital products before they get into SaaS.
These companies can get big enough to be acquired by AWS , Azure at some point. This is now the new Heroku.
The next big startup could be an application on Vercel maintained by 2 people instead of a tangle of micro services and AWS configurations maintained by 20.
Herkou’s exit wasn’t that great though. Granted, $200m isn’t an insignificant amount of money, but Netlify and Vercel are valued at billions. They would have to sell for 10x what Heroku sold for to meet expectations.
I just don’t see the valuations lining up, but I’ll probably be wrong.
I also don’t know who they get acquired by. I don’t see AWS making acquisitions like this. From what I’ve seen, it seems like they try to buy companies at lower valuations (than multiple billions).
Heroku's exit was pretty huge for its time. In fact it was the largest YC exit to-date.
For context Heroku was created in 2008 just after the housing crash. By the time they exited Facebook was still 2.5 years away from going public and a solid seed round still looked like a few hundred grand if you were a hot company (on top of the ~17k you'd get from YC).
These companies can be disruptive innovators by focusing on Niches that the big companies won’t care about because they’re tiny. For eg - managed react applications.
IIRC Firebase was acquired by google.
But the plan is to go after all of AWS slowly from a different direction. Cloud flare is doing the same thing and their stock is going gangbusters.
Cloud services are one of the most profitable businesses to ever exist. There’s so much lock in and network effects. Especially with managed solutions like these.
But: The Innovator's Solution to the Innovator's Dilemma is well-understood at this point. Incumbents know well to not ignore upstarts. Knowing (Intel v ARM [0]) and reacting are two different things, of course.
It’s not easy because of all the bureaucracies and inefficiencies at large companies. Most employees at AWS are probably barely inspired compared to the people working at Vercel who can also ship much faster. Nothing new here just what PG has been saying for years.
> It’s not easy because of all the bureaucracies and inefficiencies at large companies.
The Innovator's Solution addresses these and other issues.
http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html: Even after correctly identifying potentially disruptive technologies, firms still must circumvent its hierarchy and bureaucracy that can stifle the free pursuit of creative ideas. Christensen suggests that firms need to provide experimental groups within the company a freer rein. "With a few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology." This autonomous organization will then be able to choose the customers it answers to, choose how much profit it needs to make, and how to run its business.
> I also don’t know who they get acquired by. I don’t see AWS making acquisitions like this. From what I’ve seen, it seems like they try to buy companies at lower valuations (than multiple billions).
No reason why this won't change. A market leader needs to consolidate their position year-after-year. GitHub was a great acquisition AWS missed. They shouldn't want to miss the next GitHub.
This is likely fine for the typical "Digital Transformation" projects at huge enterprises that have a ton of cash to spend on things like this.
Everything is a Mainframe or SAP installation under the hood somewhere, but layers and layers of API mean that product teams can mostly ignore the complexity and ship a mediocre app that is only really a frontend.
You don't. You write your backend code and vercel (and others) turn it into serverless functions that can be deployed on AWS or Cloudflare. Or whoever else decides to offer serverless functions. Or you extract your backend and host it yourself. You're not vendor locking yourself.
We're in the PaaS space and we've recently went through fundraising - a good number of investors are basically just waiting and seeing on other PaaS solutions to see which one makes it to the top and then throw as much money at them as they can.
what kind of promises are they making in exchange of the capital?
why don't more capable platforms like Render or Fly.io raise as much?