I concur.
Fly is not your typical startup with dreams of becoming the next big corp monster.
They are just a bunch of talented people with a vision having fun making cool stuff.
Same has been said for every company who taken outside investment ever. "But no, Heroku/Figma/GitHub/X are different, they really do care about their users and would never sell/go public/Y", and then a couple of years later we end up in the same position.
It might not even be up to the "bunch of talented people" in the end, what they have to do to survive or to grow. But grow they have to, unless investors are fine with getting their ROI over 10-50 years rather than 1-10 years. A growing usually comes with some pain.
Which means, there will be one of three outcomes:
1. We are correct, and manage to build the right thing. We'll get to work on this forever.
2. We are correct, but not the right group to build it. We fail.
3. We are incorrect, and the world doesn't need a public cloud for devs. We fail, and I become a carpenter.
We have the same incentives as our investors. That doesn't mean it'll work. It does mean that we all believe that we're building a product for developers.
We're pretty good at surviving, so far. And there are early signs that we're good at growing. There's reason to be hopeful. :)
> We have the same incentives as our investors.
this is wrong, even if today it looks right because the different incentives result in the same concrete things.
You have a company; your goal is to make the company succeed. Investors have a portfolio; their goal is to make the portfolio succeed. Your company succeeding is only one aspect of their portfolio succeeding, and one whose importance and externalities can change drastically for reasons outside your control.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, I apologize if that's the case. But I fail to see how the company could ever work on "the right thing" "forever" since there is outside investment in the company. Do these investor not want a return on their investment at one point? If it's in 1 year or 10, eventually they are gonna want you to either go public, or get bought by another company, both of which makes the mission goal change from "the right thing" to "the profitable thing" at that moment.
But again, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic based on bad experiences with VC funded companies.
1.We are correct, and manage to build the right thing [developer first cloud]. We'll get to work on this *until we exhaust that market and are forced to grow beyond it"
