[drivebycomment]

Honestly, even with this reply, it's not at all clear what you think this YC-Google deal is validating, and how it's directly relevant to what your startup is doing.

It seems stretch to call the annoucement as any kind of validation for your startup, whatever your exact logic is here.

Your reply above makes no sense to me. NVidia isn't popular because of any "free drugs". Cloud did not become popular simply by giving free credit.

It's not at all clear what value your startup is brining to the world. El Capitan is 40MW compute. You can get that much computer from top cloud providers (with money of course) - their combined compute is in tens of GW range, estimate based on their renewable power portfolio. The barrier nowadays is roughly only money, and unless you have magic to lower the price of power and machines, you are not lowering any barrier vs top providers. If you have the magic sauce, it's not clear what that is, at least in the post.

[yanslookup]

As a counterpoint I completely understand how a founder of a company that is competing with Google on cloud AI cluster services is contributing to the discussion by describing (and I guess looking for feedback, investors, new customers, etc. This is HN...) their inventive approaches to providing similar "credit" like incentives in the article.

Their startup isn't Google. To me, it's interesting to hear how startups are competing with Google.

[latchkey]

Thanks for the comment. I honestly don't see my company as a competitor to Google though.

We're serving the need for individuals and businesses that don't want to use Google in the first place ^. Those of us who feel that there should be alternative hardware available other than just Nvidia, or even cloud solutions. We give full bare metal access to the underlying systems. We work with customers to customize their stack to tailor things to their use case. We're more 1on1 niche and solving for the least common denominator, with best-in-class solutions. Eventually, we are going to run hardware that others wouldn't normally touch and/or we are going to work to get it deployed earlier than any large cloud can.

^ Just as a side note, I'm a long time huge fan and customer of GCP, so please don't take this as bashing Google at all.

[yanslookup]

You listed things that are differentiators... to your competitors.

But ok, best of luck!

[latchkey]

I'm not sure I understand your comment. I don't know of any competitors in the US. I was responding to you saying that my company is competing with Google, and explain how I'm not, so yes, those are things that are differentiators. I'd love to know what's wrong with what I said.

[latchkey]

I like this response a lot. I'm not sure what your experience is in the field, so it is a little hard for me figure out how to reply to you. I'll do my best, but apologies if I get it wrong.

The validation is clear to me, but this is my field to recognize that. My business is about building super computers and either renting them piecemeal or whole to people and businesses. This is exactly what Google is doing in this announcement, which I take as validation because I started working on this similar thing, about a year ago now.

Nvidia built software and hardware (s/h) before AI. Nvidia ensured that all of their s/h solutions were easily available to developers. AI recognized that the s/h was useful and took advantage of that. An example of "free drugs" were to make large gifts of the s/h to colleges [0].

I'm not saying that cloud only got popular with free credit, but it definitely was a contributing factor (just an example: [1]) in the building of many startups.

The value of my startup is something I describe above in my original comment. You're dead wrong that the only barrier is money. It is the experience and relationships that we have in building, deploying and running large scale compute. Think of us as a consultancy for super computers. We also have the backing to fund the capex so that businesses don't have to put out millions up front, on rather finicky cutting edge hardware.

Not everyone needs 40MW of El Cap, all the time. Not everyone wants to deploy into a cloud, many want to have more control over where their compute and data is located. We work with Dell, AMD and data centers directly to build and deploy these systems. I won't talk about pricing other than to say that both companies are highly incentivized to work together to deploy as much compute as they can, and I'm the one that has joined with them to make it happen. I'd say that there are about 25-30 people involved with us, just to deploy our single first cluster. It is a massive amount of coordination.

It takes years of relationship building to even get your foot into the door on this. It is far more complicated than just racking boxes and we already have put the time and effort in to create the blueprint designs for best in class compute. We help companies that want this compute deployed yesterday, to speed up the whole process.

I'm sorry if that is not valuable to you personally, but it is to others.

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/higher-education-and-research

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39117292