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by snorgle2 1555 days ago
You’re talking past me, particularly harping on the blog you found from 2014 despite me directly addressing it in my reply to you (and using it to question my recollection), so it’s clear we’re not going to agree. I’m also not a fan of being told events and discussions I was a part of, firsthand, and pissed off about, firsthand, is me failing to remember the truth accurately; that’s really insulting, fundamentally, and is not an approach you should take with someone sharing their lived reality, especially when you were on the paying end and not the employed end. The rumors you heard corroborate. It happened. Notice the usually-HN-active DO folks haven’t jumped on me yet? They know it happened, too.

Again, I left on horrible terms. That’s really important to remember as you think about my motivations. I’m not here to score points for a side, which you seem to have inferred.

1 comments

I am arguing against the following assertions:

"I wouldn’t have left this seemingly negative for no reason comment had you not identified DO’s documentation strategy as an early insight. It was an early insight, but absolutely, definitively not theirs. They raised the VC to get exposed to this audience and successfully presented nearly all of Linode’s business insights as their own, and it’s understandable that it seems that way if you didn’t follow Linode before DO.

The first several years of DigitalOcean’s existence made it very clear they looked at Linode and said that, but with funding rounds. And that’s fine. They’ve done well. But let’s not attribute insights to their copies of things; their primary corporate insight all along was realizing Linode was handicapped with bootstrapped capital alone. And to give them credit, it was undeniably savvy to apply Linode’s successes to scaling DigitalOcean. It just means it’s not their ingenuity in any sense of the word."

I did follow Linode before DigitalOcean. I did espouse the wonders of Linode, day in, day out. I did resist switching from Linode to DigitalOcean for years because of brand loyalty. I do consider Linode very important in shaping the industry, but I categorically disagree with the assertion that DigitalOcean's core insight was that Linode were cash-poor and all someone needed to do was "Linode but with VC". Your time at Linode and your damaged relationship with Linode are not evidence that DigitalOcean is Linode-but-with-money.

We aren't discussing your lived reality, we're discussing your dismissal of the achievements of DigitalOcean.