[OriginalMrPink]

The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing burger.

[berkle4455]

A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty noteworthy to me.

That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/.

[OriginalMrPink]

I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific what I don't like about their communication.

"$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

"There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb."

I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.

[comice]

> We’re all adults here, we can talk about this stuff, right?

proceeds to not really talk about it

[tptacek]

What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as a customer.

[OriginalMrPink]

Really? What are you going to tell them after they signed? "You bought it, suckers!"

You might have found your audience. But for me the tonality of the post felt way off.

[comice]

as the OP says:

> but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

[tptacek]

You get that there's a whole section of this post headlined "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money", right?

[OriginalMrPink]

"Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money" doesn't answer any of the questions above. I've seen private equity rounds disguised as traditional founding rounds, which is neither very transparent, nor very honest. Raising 70M just shortly after a 25M round makes me feel like there was more at play then just 'raising' money tbh. But I might be totally off here - but therefore disclosing a bit more than you currently do might be really helpful.

[lazyant]

Not even 14 jobs, there's only one (or two) open positions listed there.

[tptacek]

We'll be hiring for many of these positions again shortly. We weren't funding constrained, just people constrained; there are whole sprawling threads on HN about how annoyed we managed to make some people (a small minority of applicants, but that doesn't make it any easier for us to metabolize) with our responsiveness in our hiring process. We halted most hiring to retool and nail down hiring processes, and also to onboard all the people we hired (so they can help us do more hiring stuff).

Raising lots of money to hire 2 people is a funny flex, so I sort of wanted to leave this unanswered, but I also don't want to miss an opportunity to put on a hairshirt and talk about things we fucked up.

[berkle4455]

Oh, damn, I didn't even notice that the job is listed alongside a "no positions"