Weaveworks is shutting down

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richardsonalexis_hi-everyone-i-am-very-sad-to-announce-activity-7160295096825860096-ZS67

by candiddevmike • 2 years ago

277 252 2 years ago

linkedin.com

edoceo• 2 years ago

https://www.weave.works/ "Operate and Manage Kubernetes easily" / "GitOps Automation for Kubernetes Stacks"

jes5199• 2 years ago

thanks, I didn't recognize the name

stackskipton• 2 years ago

Probably most popular thing they built was FluxCD if you are confused where you have heard their name before.

Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.

catherinecodes3• 2 years ago

Right. Flux was a handy little tool[1] that sync'd yaml manifests in git repos to live clusters. The concept was fascinating, and the tool was well done--small and efficient. Easy to learn.

In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3].

The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated.

1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux 2: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-ar... 3: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2

sleepybrett• 2 years ago

People like the weave network policy controller too.. at least in the earlier days of kubernetes, their cni was pretty popular for awhile.

preisschild3• 2 years ago

I hope so too. Flux is the best Kubernetes Gitops toolkit IMO.

tnolet2• 2 years ago

I was following them on and off as they started around the same time I started a company in similar space and we shared an investor. Similarly, Armory.io also got sold in what seems a fire sale ($7M after raising $200M).

Goes to show how hard this space is.

ushakov3• 2 years ago

There’s no money in DevTools. Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

dilyevsky5• 2 years ago

It seems like you need to be doing at least part services play - product alone doesn’t cut it

marcinzm3• 2 years ago

Something that requires you changing your whole dev process around it and then shuts down one day is not an asset.

ralph84• 2 years ago

Atlassian’s market cap is $55 billion. GitLab’s market cap is $11 billion. GitHub sold for $7.5 billion in 2018. There’s money, you just have to be more than a point solution.

mooreds3• 2 years ago

There’s no money in DevTools.

MongoDB, Snyk and Auth0 might beg to differ. (I work for an Auth0 competitor.)

Businesses will see you as cost, not asset

Isn't that true of any tool? How are devtools different (from a business perspective)?

mathverse• 2 years ago

Companies dont want to pay for specialized building blocks. Similarly we've been looking at Coralogix recently but needed synthetics. We were offered some sort of package with ur company but decided to go with Datadog instead.

tnolet2• 2 years ago

All good. Just wanted to mention this was with a company I started before my current to which you are referencing.

fxtentacle• 2 years ago

"a very promising M&A process with a larger company fell through at the 11th hour. And so we decided to shut down"

JojoFatsani2• 2 years ago

Sad that some of the folks behind Weave didn't get a possibly life-changing exit.

makkes• 2 years ago

The acquisition talked about in the original post wasn't much more than a life-saver for the company so in that regard you could call it life-changing in that many of the fine folks I worked with wouldn't have lost their job.

It would have been very very far from what you usually call an exit, though. Nobody would have cashed out, except maybe some of the VCs and I'm not sure if they'd have called it a successful exit in terms of financial win.

mihaitodor3• 2 years ago

Sometime last year, they had someone cold call me from the US to sell me stuff. I’m not sure where they got my number from, but I don’t think that’s a good strategy for trying to sell B2B solutions.

RigelKentaurus• 2 years ago

Agreed that it's not a good strategy, but unfortunately all too common amongst tech companies, especially startups.

gedy• 2 years ago

"LambdaTest" does that crap and will call even on weekends. I'm like gtfo of here man. Testing tools is like the last thing I want to talk about on weekend or on personal phone.

javierluraschi• 2 years ago

What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you?

coding123• 2 years ago

The product is so good you found out about it from someone else and had to have it also... Kinda like docker or python or something.

They actually had that when the first started.

mihaitodor3• 2 years ago

I’m a bit more receptive to offline messages if they’re targeted adequately. They can see my interests by skimming my LinkedIn, GitHub and StackOverflow accounts and contacting me via social media or by email is fine if their product is somewhat relevant to my work or hobbies. However, asking me to spend my time trialing their “new super-cool Kubernetes offering” is a huge nope. Especially if that interaction happens over the phone.

pyb• 2 years ago

Look up "permission marketing"

slgeorge4• 2 years ago

Sorry that annoyed you.

One thing to bear in mind is that at Weaveworks we made massive contributions and did our best to be part of the community in the right way:

* Flux * Flagger * Cortex * Ignite * Weave Net * and a whole host more

Oh and there's a load of people without jobs tonight - wondering about their futures - hopefully people will see the talent and the contributions and find roles for them.

mihaitodor3• 2 years ago

And that's a huge bummer since I know people who rely on those products and they're getting value out of them. However, I don't think the company failed because it didn't use more aggressive advertising.

mad_vill2• 2 years ago

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy.

Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

"Air has been let out" in the sense that it's moved past the trough of disillusionment and is on its way to the plateau of productivity[1].

There are still a few people in the trough of disillusionment yelling about how a $5/month VPS is all you'll ever need, or a $50/month bare metal colocated server is all you'll ever need. But for the most part the people who benefit from cloud services & containerization will use it when they need to, avoid it when they don't. It'll continue to be a productive tool when used properly, with vendors supporting mature products using it that solve people's problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

nprateem3• 2 years ago

Like with big data I think most orgs (>80%) just don't need it due to the extra complexity. They might as well just use something managed like fargate and go back to building their own products.

quickthrower2• 2 years ago

Must have miss the drama / holy war memos. Happily use a mix of k8s and non k8s at work and use that $5 VM for home side hussle.

marcinzm3• 2 years ago

Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

Not really, the space has simply grown faster than these companies could keep up with and were left behind.

I can code up a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions in well under a week. With docker compose for local testing. That wasn't the case 5 years ago but it is now. Why would I want to be locked into Weave Works?

xenophonf2• 2 years ago

a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions... [with] docker compose for local testing

Please teach me, oh wise prince!

swozey3• 2 years ago

Hell, we do it once in terraform/pulumi/cdk and then it takes 10 minutes to tweak some variables and switch aws accounts and bam

Our devs/SRE put up apps and clusters in minutes (aside from the terrible alb/ecs/eks/etc deployment times).

FourierEnvy3• 2 years ago

Yeah I literally did this last week for a new in house AI assistant for my company. Just swap out Jenkins for GH actions (sadly). So... can confirm.

upupupandaway• 2 years ago

How does your pipeline work with an app that requires many other services to work?

mad_vill2• 2 years ago

they did more than just CICD but I see your point.

benjaminwootton• 2 years ago

GitHub actions must have eaten most of the DevOps tooling market. It’s pretty good and it’s fine for the vast majority of pipelines.

BrittonR• 2 years ago

I feel like this is how a lot of the Nix community and Elixir community already functions.

gtirloni5• 2 years ago

that was so popular in the late 2010s

Was? What's more popular than that today?

goalonetwo6• 2 years ago

Since the end of the free money era, a lot of people are rightly questioning the microservice/k8s/cloud-native model that requires you to run an operation team of 20 people and has a baseline cost of 200k$/year for a cluster that doesn't do anything yet.

mfer2• 2 years ago

VC funded and looking for growth opportunities is far different than building a long term sustainable business. The carrot in the business model leads business decisions in very different directions and your setup is different to meet them.

Are there opportunities for VC funded with growth expectations in this kind of business?

swozey3• 2 years ago

Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

Kubernetes is just boring now. It's stable, the people who need to know it probably know it. I started working and contributing to k8s in 2015 back in version 1.1. 7 years of the same technology. I haven't even used it in 2-3 years (1.18) and I know I can hop over to it and do exactly what I used to do with some CRD flare.

All of the contributors should be proud of what they've built, that's the goal in the end, stability to where it's an afterthought.

softwaredoug2• 2 years ago

"Smaller consultancies" are actually really hard. Especially if you want to deal with larger companies with the type of $$ to pay for consulting. Instead of doing the work you love you end up in procurement and payment hell.

mech422• 2 years ago

God, sales and collections suck ... and Net 90 can be a killer for smaller shops (and big clients tend to expect Net 90)

kensey2• 2 years ago

Small consultancies also tend to fall into the trap of having one client (often their first client) that they utterly depend on the money from... but who doesn't depend on them to be able to survive. That customer almost always knows the relationship is unbalanced in their favor (sometimes they went into the relationship specifically because they knew it would be that way) and they will run you ragged with unreasonable requests, burning out your staff and ruining your relationships with other clients because you have to keep them happy so they keep writing checks (and then you're even more dependent on them, as a rancid little bonus).

The only way out is to either gut your way through it till you grow enough to be able to push back without risking your existence; detect that things are going that way early and fire them as a customer before it ever gets to that point... or keep burning out staff till you can't find fresh faces, then close up shop.

ryanSrich• 2 years ago

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy.

The issue here is the lack of appeal for investors, leading to a tenfold decrease in new cos. However, the startups that do launch are likely to be more sustainable

gangstead2• 2 years ago

smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side

I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.

When you are running a consultancy you are in the business of marking up developer hours: find a client to sign a contract for $150 / hour and hire a consultant who will do the job for $100k/year salary. Then convince them to work as many hours as possible for their fixed salary, plus the carrot of a bonus payout every once in a while if everyone bills lots of hours.

Having that developer spend any time working on the company's product causes all sort of problems. The most immediate is the loss of revenue. But also now this employee might see working on the product as cutting into their bonus since they are billing less hours. Everyone wants some of the upside if the side product generates revenue but how do you split it between people who worked directly on the product and people who worked on paying client jobs to generate the revenue so the others could work on the product? It ends up causing a rift.

The other thing I've seen while working at small and even medium sized consultancies is that they end up dependent on one large customer who calls all the shots and takes up all the available time, or all "extra" time not being billed is used working on sales for the next contract. Either way there doesn't end up being much capacity to work on cool tooling.

catherinecodes3• 2 years ago

Right. I wonder what their cost structure was like. $10 million in revenue is enough to support a decent-sized team.

danjrslp• 2 years ago

I agree. Being good at running a consulting company does not translate to being good at running a product/SaaS/devtools company.

mooreds3• 2 years ago

I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.

The only time I've seen this work (and I have seen it work multiple times) is with managed hosting.

So if you are an expert at developing web applications or solutions using <product X> you can offer a managed hosting solution to your clients where you host the web app or the <product X> solution. Not all of them will take you up on it, but some will. Those that do will pay you a monthly fee. This isn't free (you now have to carry a pager) but is recurring.

Building your own SaaS/other unrelated product? That's a rock I've seen several consulting ships crash into (to pick a metaphor). Here's one that some of my friends tried to build in the late 2000s that I wrote about: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/506

abhiyerra2• 2 years ago

This is what we are doing with my company. We build out tooling that benefits everyone and open source most of it, but our bread and butter is consulting. Our consulting leads us to build more tooling to make our jobs easier, which leads to more effectively delivering our consulting.

I think this is the model most of the big shops like IBM and Oracle also use. Infrastructure tooling is not usually a core competency for most companies, and they want others to do it for them.

tsimionescu2• 2 years ago

Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

As someone who works for a company that sells various k8s versions of products and services, we're only now seeing some of our bigger customers really starting to use k8s more exclusively. So at least my experience is the opposite of yours, it seems that at least in some industries k8s is only now seeing significant adoption.

jbu• 2 years ago

I know a bit of the history with this one.

Back in the day there was a smaller consultancy with awesome developers called LShift (mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City). They worked out that an open source messaging thing would be useful, and created RabbitMQ (there were details about who, how it was funded internally, etc). That got sold to VMWare, and a bunch of people went with it, but LShift went on as before, happy, but always looking for another Rabbit. Didn't find one, was aquihired in the end.

Meanwhile, some of the Rabbit people formed Weave, looking for the killer business around the early container ecosystem (https://www.weave.works/oss/net/ was interesting, eksctl, flux, CNCF, lots of good things). But I guess they took a bite of the VC apple and sustainable technical contributions was no longer the goal.

I've huge respect for everyone I knew from Weave. Great people all. Best wishes and I know you'll land on your feet.

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

Welp. Time to switch CNI on that k8s cluster...

This is why whenever there is a choice between a grassroots open source project, and a corporate source project, I choose grassroots. When the corporation gets bored of the project (or just dies), the project dies too. Grassroots doesn't die as long as one person is still willing to merge PRs and make releases, and grassroots is much more likely to be forked and maintained in perpetuity. Community makes or breaks open source.

menthe• 2 years ago

Kinda surprised anyone would still using WeaveNet as a CNI.. it was a bit of a dumpster fire: https://blog.quentin-machu.fr/2020/08/07/our-breakup-with-we...

whalesalad• 2 years ago

what is the idiomatic approach these days?

hitpointdrew• 2 years ago

It has been 100% fine for me, was easiest to deploy, very easy to encrypt all network communication. Has been anything but a dumpster fire, will likely wait it out a see what happens with the plugin, rather than switch to something else.

throwitaway222• 2 years ago

They were exciting when they first started, (8 years ago?) before k8s - they had some interesting networking capabilities including the ability to use zeroconf. A lot of Java clustering stuff builds off that which made them special in the age of Docker.

break_the_bank2• 2 years ago

The company was turning over double digit revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023.

From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?

kwerk• 2 years ago

I think they meant to say "double digit revenue growth"

break_the_bank2• 2 years ago

That makes more sense! Thank you.

gk1• 2 years ago

Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years.

I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."

marcinzm3• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a bit.

Productivity is a hard sell for a company that is tech focused. Since a client basically can't measure the impact there is little external difference between a true solution and a fake solution. As a result even if you convince someone of the value a company that focuses on marketing to those paying the bills will win out against one that focused on building a better product.

Security has fairly proscriptive compliance requirements (ie: SOC, etc.) which provide a benchmark against which to measure impact. Not impact on security but impact on meeting the compliance requirements.

goalonetwo6• 2 years ago

Is that because as soon as you become a so-called security product you are now selling to the CISO org?

My experience with the CISO org is that they love buying expensive B2B enterprise products that have very limited real-life use-cases but are really good at checking boxes. That whole cloud-native security industry is full of FUD and fear-based selling to non technical organizations

hipadev232• 2 years ago

Weaveworks lays off 100% of staff. What was the headcount? ~50 people?

yebyen11• 2 years ago

It was over 100 at the peak, I'm not sure how many of us were left last month. You're not far off.

hipadev232• 2 years ago

Brutal. Well, best of luck to you all

fideloper• 2 years ago

Oh, just recently I noticed they had archived Ignite (within the last few months?), their very handy wrapper around Firecracker. What a shame!

pstuart• 2 years ago

That's how they originally caught my eye.

adamfeldman• 2 years ago

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-man...

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023

That is a curious KPI.

samcat116• 2 years ago

Its a pretty common KPI for B2B companies.

mousetree• 2 years ago

In the B2B SaaS world, it means they're signing up new customers (e.g. including some who might have well known logos).

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

Outside of bizdev brotalk, isn't that called "new clients"?

yebyen11• 2 years ago

It makes sense if you take in context that Flux, the most visible and well-known product of Weaveworks, is a donated CNCF open source project, and that companies like Microsoft, VMWare, AWS – can all engage with it directly, or by forking, or by building support for it directly into their own products.

How do you place a value on Microsoft building Flux into Azure Arc? I know it isn't worth $0 but do they actually need a contract with anybody (at Flux or Weaveworks) in order to go on doing that - no. They don't need one.

lijok• 2 years ago

Pouring one out tonight. Weaveworks did some amazing work. Grafanalib has saved me months of work in the past.

slgeorge4• 2 years ago

Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.

preisschild3• 2 years ago

Thanks from me too. So far I've only used Flux in my homelab only, but I found it far better than ArgoCD, which I use at work.

slgeorge4• 2 years ago

The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now.

People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations

Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt.

If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!

aftbit• 2 years ago

Just in time for cloud native to lose the spotlight in favor of on-prem and AI.

mfer2• 2 years ago

Cloud native does not mean public cloud. Google uses many of these patterns to run their own datacenters.

slgeorge4• 2 years ago

FFS - talk about missing the point.

dominis• 2 years ago

Were there any salespeople on the team?

eh_why_not• 2 years ago

The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now.

Question from someone with mostly back-end/services non-cloud dev skills: what exactly are Cloud Native skills?

dharmab• 2 years ago

Experience building and operating large systems using public cloud services and design patterns without falling into the traps such as ludicrously overpriced SKUs, API limits, low quota, data transfer fees, and all the boring stuff in the fine print that will rack up a 7 digit bill.

mofirouz• 2 years ago

I'm very interested to get connected to the DevRel and marketing folks. I'm one of the founders of Heroic Labs - we build OSS game server (Nakama). My email is mo at heroiclabs dot com - please ping me!

propter_hoc• 2 years ago

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow.

At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees.

On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-...

In other words they somehow were running at a loss of about 1.5 million a month for three years until their runway "suddenly" ran out today.

According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed.

How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.

api3• 2 years ago

Sometimes investors have no interest in anything but a large exit. So it's large exit or bust. Building something stable that grows at a reasonable pace is considered the worst outcome because it both consumes investors time/energy and delays closure of a fund. They're left holding shares that are illiquid.

It's perverse of course but it can be something baked into the structure of how VCs and other funds work.

NavinF• 2 years ago

They're left holding shares that are illiquid

More specifically, how much is a SAFE for 7% of a small business worth? If there are no liquidity events it will be impossible for investors to even get their money back let alone outperform SPX

ushakov3• 2 years ago

We don't know all the details. Maybe they had high costs elsewhere or a market insight that made them re-think whether they want to be continuing to operate that business

orsenthil2• 2 years ago

I think, motivation would have been, if they were able to sell themselves as 200 person company, the CEO and Board would gotten a bigger piece of the pie in the landing space.

bogomipz2• 2 years ago

As I pointed out elsewhere the 200 person company is not accurate. The OP is quoting something listed as "peak" on Linkedin without even providing a reference. And for some reason everyone is running with that figure. Nearly every tech company had a peak headcount during the height of Covid. Techcrunch generally also has inaccurate tech company numbers in their profiles. Also you can't sell yourself as a 200 person company if you don't actually have 200 people as that would come out immediately in any due diligence an acquiring company would would do on you.

wg0• 2 years ago

According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed.

That's probably pretty brutal summary of most of past two decades I guess?

Also, had it been bootstrapped, might have a different outcome, could scale down, pivot while staying a small profitable shop.

girvo2• 2 years ago

That's probably pretty brutal summary of most of past two decades I guess?

Longer. This has been the main playbook even going back to the '00s!

KaiserPro3• 2 years ago

According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed.

Because that is what startups do. 80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern

You shoot for the moon, if you don't take massive risks, then you won't be rewarded.

It sounded like they were about to be bought out or aquihired, but it fell apart at the last moment (It's not uncommon)

Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.

because probably they looked at the pipeline and realised that if they wanted to deliver the features/customer growth they needed, they required 200 people to get there.

ssharp• 2 years ago

"Shoot for the moon" seems like a reasonable strategy when you're making the investment.

However, certainly at some point while they were burning through that $36 million it became evident that "moon" was no longer a viable destination. Why wouldn't everyone be aligned with making the adjustments needed to get back to default alive? Something is clearly better than nothing.

Now if it got to the stage where the CEO no longer wanted to operate at the reduced scale (and nobody else would take the role) or the product couldn't support itself at the reduced scale, then closure may have been the only option. It's just that the "moon or bust" mentality doesn't seem like something that should be set in stone for the life of the company.

rdedev• 2 years ago

80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern

Doesn't this sound like selection bias? If every other startup follows this shoot fornthe moon plan then yeah it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy

prisenco• 2 years ago

Because that is what startups do

Feels like a ZIRP truism that we may be seeing challenged in real time.

The next wave of successful tech companies might be the ones who explore new business models that better fit the new circumstances.

scott_w• 2 years ago

It sounded like they were about to be bought out or aquihired, but it fell apart at the last moment (It's not uncommon)

Perhaps the buyer didn’t want to be on the hook for the massive losses they were racking up?

m00x• 2 years ago

They could have done layoffs like almost every startup and big tech company did in the past few years. They could have gone there with 50 good employees. Gumroad almost went bankrupt then came back from the ashes.

nokun7• 2 years ago

It sounded like they were about to be bought out or aquihired, but it fell apart at the last moment (It's not uncommon)

Do you know who was about to acquire them?

pdntspa2• 2 years ago

they required 200 people to get there.

We really need to be casting more doubt on these assessments.

antirez• 2 years ago

Shooting at the moon should be about the kind of work you do. Quality vs size. 50 focuses persons can do incredible things.

BobbyTables2• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure the way to slow down a highly productive group of 20-50 is to quadruple their size.

I’ve never seen a team of 100 developers do anything quickly. Motivated teams of 10-20 can do amazing things.

Some scale is needed, but 100 people working for 1 year cannot accomplish that of 10 people for 10 years.

The irony is they could have kept headcount low, and used the $$ millions to do amazing things for years. Instead it is torched for bragging rights.

michaelcampbell2• 2 years ago

80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern

What % of startups that follow this pattern are successful, though, I wonder?

colechristensen• 2 years ago

It's not that unreasonable. During the post-covid inflation and high interest rates getting loans and attracting funding got very much more difficult. Downsizing by 75% probably would result in a failure that just took longer. They chose to keep going in attempts of securing that next step and it didn't work so they shuttered. The environment for funding changed and the less attractive startups shuttered, that's what happens. Maintaining a short runway is a vibe, a path towards a big reward or a quick failure. That risk isn't for everybody.

purpleblue• 2 years ago

Because no one that matters cares about a company that makes $10 million per year, neither the cofounders nor the board. Everyone wants 100x that because they want to become 9 figure wealthy or more. Better to close down, fuck the customers, and then have the cofounders start a new "journey" in hopes of getting that unicorn status and become fabulously wealthy.

hef198982• 2 years ago

I know that you are right, it is just so incredibly stupid.

great_thanks• 2 years ago

i keep reading confounders...

axiak• 2 years ago

If they received $36 MM in a fundraise 3 years ago, you better believe that those investors put pressure on the business to grow fast or die trying. Those investors are not looking for a somewhat risky medium % return, they're looking for each company to have a small % chance of being a unicorn.

mcherm• 2 years ago

So who out there is running an investment fund that's looking to make a much more reasonable rate of return off successful but slowly growing companies? Because I would put money into that fund.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

> How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner?

I've worked at several startups who never cut costs, meanwhile they're burning through cash faster than an incinerator at the local trash company. I had one company CEO who remodeled our entire offices, got sky boxes for all the local sports teams (there were four of those) and made a point to tell all the devs they're the highest paid startup devs in the city.

I found out later, our CEO also had a pissing contest with another startup CEO on the same floor of the building we were in. Both companies had over $200M in VC money, and both were trying to outdo each other with the lavish lifestyles they were living on the investors money.

The other company put on a massive "release" party to announce their internet software to the local tech new media. Apparently they blew close 10 $2M on it. Limo's for all the employees to the five star hotel ball room, a red carpet VIP entrance for all the employees like you see on those awards show, some 70's rock band played, and it was open bar all night and they reserved an entire floor of rooms in the hotel where the bash was thrown. Two of the devs told me afterwards, "Dude, totally not my scene, and none of our team were cool with this at all."

Less than two months later, both companies ran out of money, quietly shut their doors and closed down.

At a bar across the street, we had a group of devs from both companies sitting around lamenting what went wrong, where we were going to next, and reminisce about both companies.

We all reached the same conclusion:

> According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances

hef198982• 2 years ago

Seems VC backed start-ups are the real lifestyle companies for their founders, doesn't it?

dgellow• 2 years ago

got sky boxes for all the local sports teams

What are those? Is it like a video game sky box, something you somehow attach to your ceiling to create a “sky” environment?

superb-owl• 2 years ago

No to be pedantic, but payroll isn’t 100% of cost. Plus cash flow issues, sales volatility, probably declining revenue as you scale down…my guess is the headcount should be more like 20-30. And that might not cover their personnel needs if a lot of their revenue relies on services and customer success (which is usually the case for OSS companies)

zx8080• 2 years ago

How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner?

It's like playing Super Mario: one life left? Die sooner to restart again.

There will be a next startup soon, and saving this one does not worth effort. Besides that, the CEO has probably got his cut already as salary. This cow is done, bring in the next one.

blagie• 2 years ago

There are many reasons this happens:

1) As a CEO, I want headcount. Being the CEO of a 200-person operation sets me up for better jobs than a 50-person one. Being in high-profile organizations if good too (and when they fail, I can switch jobs). Same for VPs and managers.

2) As a CEO, I want bonuses. Those come from growth. Zero bonus is the same whether the company lives or stagnates.

3) Rationally, in winner-takes-all markets, a lot of this depends on early losses and overspending. If you and I are building eBay, and I get there for $10M and you for $100M in 10% less time running massive losses, you win. A lot of tech is winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most.

.... and so on.

Except for retirement account holders whose money is being spent, it's almost certainly better to be a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn than a growing, profitable 50 person company.

bogomipz2• 2 years ago

"According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company"

Where in the linkedin post does the CEO state that?

My understanding is that they reduced headcount greatly over the last couple of years and were well below a 100 people. The source of this was a then current employee that my company interviewed in November.

goalonetwo6• 2 years ago

we all know that once you get 36 Million$ of investment, you cannot "just" run a 50 people startup that will have a stable valuation of maybe 100m$.

Once you take big investment it comes with the expectation you will get to 500m$ at least. VCs don't want to 2x their money. They want a small chance of 20x.

kjs3• 2 years ago

Another 'CEO' with "Everything was going AWESOME! Our numbers were great and getting BETTER! Our customers LOVED us! Buuut...we're closing shop, today. Totes sorry, bro.". Not a single mention of "because we managed cash like a drunken sailor and bet the farm on a singular exit event". The spin is making me a tad dizzy.

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

Also with AI, the "plan-b" of VCs, which is selling the company as a people asset with a people x M = $$$ multiplier breaks down more and more.

araes• 2 years ago

Incentives. Lots of incentive to ride the horse to death while the money's still available. You get free stuff, get to live the high life, gain celebrity, get interviewed, make social media posts people pay attention to, get invited to fancy parties like Davos. No bad publicity.

Probably get more money on the next startup as a result. WeWork is an excellent example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/business/dealbook/adam-ne...

In a lot of cases, it seems like the real incentive is "pretend to have a really desirable product, make demo after demo to draw in investment, party as much as you can while pretending to make something, lateral to the next company while claiming external market conditions." Live the Wolf of Wall St. life while the Titanic sinks.

Still think the main Pokemon advancement for companies is mostly -> Bankemon -> Casinomon

dfltr• 2 years ago

Potemkin unicorn.

Thank you for putting these two words together, they're perfect.

tmnvix• 2 years ago

It's a naive point of view, I know, but I often wonder how a business could function if wages and salaries were considered to be profit. This is clear enough for an individual running a business, or even a family operation.

For larger businesses would it be possible without adopting an extreme socialist (or even communist) approach? If so, how would you balance this with the interests of investors/owners (i.e. people that aren't involved in the operation of the business)? Would the businesses be more or less sustainable on average? Does the very existence of outside investors necessitate categorising wages and salaries as a cost?

orsenthil2• 2 years ago

https://eksctl.io/ is a very useful tool developed and maintained by weaveworks. I hope it will continue to see development and maintenance despite this news.

Sad to see a good startup folding up. All the best for your next adventure.

kbumsik• 2 years ago

eksctl should be fine.

It is the official recommend tool by AWS and eksctl examples are everywhere in the AWS documentation.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...

pmig2• 2 years ago

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else?

But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

FourierEnvy3• 2 years ago

Better UI

mac-chaffee• 2 years ago

I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me.

ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA...

While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.

alwyn• 2 years ago

I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior?

Thanks!

pmig2• 2 years ago

One if the decision points for us using Flux was the the helm controller. ArgoCD will just render the helm chart and apply the manifests. If you already habe an Helm Release in your cluster the migration path was easier with flux.

arccy3• 2 years ago

there was a ui, and they fumbled their flux -> flux2

shurup2• 2 years ago

I guess it was UI, indeed. Whatever "true engineers" think or say, it is an attractive option for many potential users (think not of Ops only, but of Devs, too). Therefore, it brings a bigger audience, i.e. more adopters, more contributors, more integrations, more whatever…

denysvitali• 2 years ago

The UI makes it easier to sell it to non-engineers.

Not that you need to "buy" anything - but IIRC the only offering that Flux had was a SaaS feature that sort of gave you an UI.

If the UI was what you were looking for, you'd go with ArgoCD.

Finally, I think they messed up the Flux 1 -> 2 migration as they weren't compatible with each other. For my own use case, instead of migrating to 2 I have just switched to ArgoCD.

Feature-wise, ArgoCD always seemed one step ahead, and more people seemed to prefer ArgoCD over Flux - and this can probably be seen also by the fact that they had an "ArgoCon" but there was never a "FluxCon".

Don't get me wrong, I love(d) Flux and I always rooted for that - but over time I switched to ArgoCD and never looked back. In the end, they were two products doing pretty much the same thing, under the CNCF umbrella.

alexitosrv• 2 years ago

In LinkedIn I also read some of their key people wrote a post with this wording for the announcement: "I americium precise bittersweet to denote – officially – that Weaveworks volition beryllium closing its doors and shutting down commercialized operations." and I almost had an stroke trying to parse it...

sevagh• 2 years ago

Cortex was mentioned below. Weaveworks did a lot of work with scaling Prometheus with their tool Cortex [1]

1: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file

GeorgeRichard• 2 years ago

This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.

goalonetwo6• 2 years ago

That whole CloudNative industry seems to be going downhill since the end of the free-money era.

It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S.

But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.

spicyusername2• 2 years ago

I've worked with Kubernetes extensively since it became popular.

Of the maybe hundred of companies I've worked with trying to onboard to Kubernetes, I don't think a single one really had a use case that justified the increased complexity.

Kubernetes seems so great until you're suddenly drowning in YAML, un-upgraded clusters out of their support window, the need for an unbelievable amount of extra tooling (e.g. ArgoCD, Helm, CSI plugins, Operators), etc.

Plenty of places made it work by paying for huge teams to manage it, but deploying software on regular old Linux servers is fine for most people with just a small amount of discipline.

Use boring technology.

abhiyerra2• 2 years ago

You don't actually need most of that additional tech. Github Actions + Managed Kubernetes + Helm is solid. Everything else can be additive as needed. ArgoCD is largely useful for deploying to multi single tenant customer installations, but overkill if you have a single prod cluster for example.

cangeroo• 2 years ago

I think it's worth giving praise for their contributions to Flux.

In my network, I'm the only one using ArgoCD. Supposedly they're equals, but it always made me curious to try Flux.

Are there any statements about the future of Flux and other open source tools, and whether the remaining community has enough resources to maintain development, or if they will reduce their contributions to only fixing critical bugs?

yebyen11• 2 years ago

Flux has a pinned discussion for nearly a month now, to be as upfront as possible, without being able to disclose anything that might be privileged information, but anticipating that the news would get out about our backer sooner or later (aiming to avoid 100 threads about the same topic)

https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/

tl;dr: Flux is a graduated CNCF project and not going anywhere

shurup2• 2 years ago

Can't tell for all their projects, but Flux seems to be safe. Stefan Prodan joined ControlPlane last month already and keeps developing Flux CD. Its latest release (v2.2.3) was delivered while working in the new company. He is also working on Enterprise Distribution for Flux CD (https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/distribution) there now.

debarshri• 2 years ago

We will never understand the journey of the founders here. In the journey you make mistakes, some of them fatal some of them not so fatal. But the bottomline is that weaveworks did built some awesome tools for the k8s ecosystem. They kind of propagated Gitops in k8s ecosystem.

This is also a cautionary tale for the opensource centric businesses. I remember in my previous job, they would bundle and sell weavescope in the offering where in they would just get the latest version from quay or docker hub as is. I saw the same pattern with Grafana tools. Alot of "Make k8s simple" platforms bundle bunch of these VC funded devtools as offering. Loss of value sometime pains me.

ShamelessC2• 2 years ago

Can someone please explain what this company actually did? I’m not a cloud person per se, but I find it strange that I’ve never heard of them given the overwhelming number of people here who are familiar.

bboreham3• 2 years ago

Outside of the Containers / Cloud Native world, not much. But they were the 10th-biggest contributor to Kubernetes as of 2020, which for a ~50-person company is something.

Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword.

Weaveworks created and/or substantially funded these Open Source projects:

- FluxCD

- Cortex (scalable Prometheus)

- Weave Net

- Weave Scope (seen in 2023 KubeCon keynote)

- EKSctl

- Kubeadm

- Kspan

Plus many others.

MrBuddyCasino• 2 years ago

But what do you pay them money for? What problems do they solve for you?

johann8384• 2 years ago

So what's going to happen to the sock shop now?

yebyen11• 2 years ago

LOL you'll have to get your socks somewhere else. The microservices demo is officially deprecated and archived:

https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo

I have seen others are still using it but not officially from anyone at Weaveworks

mathattack• 2 years ago

It’s a pretty awful note.

“ The company was turning over double digit (>$10M) revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023.”

Sounds like he was measuring the wrong things.

“I could say that this should not have happened, but I know that we are not alone in this market.”

Sounds like he’s justifying his failure by point at others in the market.

Written like a Wall Street trader. Oh wait…

carlsborg• 2 years ago

Founder profile: started out as a rates trader at Goldman, and then founded RabbitMQ and sold it to VMware.

King.

withinboredom3• 2 years ago

I'm literally not surprised...

https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment...

And my comment: "Why would someone pay for something that is broken?"

If you only prioritize work for paying customers, and don't do things to grow ... you'll eventually die from attrition.

spicyusername2• 2 years ago

Wow, the reply from the CEO was really tone deaf.

They clearly do not understand how to engage with the community.

runamok• 2 years ago

As I recalled eksctl is mostly maintained by weaveworks. https://eksctl.io/getting-started/

Weaveworks is shutting down

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