> Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,” he said.
I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing are not profitable yet after years in the market and thousands of customers. C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.
Basically what happens is that even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company, so you need to scale a lot the sales team and the customer support team, so you spend more money in order to end with more customers, not caring about the short term profitability. This is common to most startups basically.
Btw the Redis Labs development team at this point is quite large, because Redis open source is the core, but the company produces a number of things in order to provide a good managed Redis experience, all the additional features and modules, and so forth. But even so, I think it is accurate to say that most money in most companies of this kind will go to orchestrate the company at a different level, not just R&D.
The Basecamp model has the risk of some other company doing the same thing by taking venture capital and growing by getting more customers. At some point the economy of scale kicks in and the service get cheaper than Basecamp model.
Basecamp could have been slack, but slack ate their cake.
The problem is that, for a lot of companies, the endgame is continued midsize existence; it’s death when you stop getting new customers and old ones phase out.
The low marginal cost of software doesn’t guarantee winner-take-all markets by any stretch, but it does apply pressure in that direction.
If you took VC money, 'enough' is when you cannot expect to profit from more money put into the company. (something to do with 'NPV' or net-present value, if I'm not mistaken)
And it's not about greed really - you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
Yes there are no laws but I always wonder about this.
If people are serious about testing this premise, why not be upfront with the investors and actually tell them that "maximizing profit is not one of our (primary) goals"?
It strikes me as daft to pick on only that. Why's it special? Greed?
Why not be upfront with investors and tell them keeping the company viable, developing new products, finding better processes, treating staff acceptably, or maintaining the environment are not primary goals?
So why fixate on profit or shareholder value? Once you act as though it is a prime directive, you necessarily relegate the others. There are going to be a lot of times in the life of a company where growth, longevity, research or a dozen other things should take priority for a time.
By not doing so, and continuing to push the continually increasing dividend, you weaken the company. Weaker and ripe for takeover, or lacking the next generation of products that might give 20 more years of profit. Maybe by showing so much greed in your pricing that your customers give up and go elsewhere.
A long lived, vibrant, profitable company is more than just a growing dividend and share price, it's a constant balancing act of all of the above. Profit is indirectly maximised as a result of that balance.
One part is especially worth quoting, from John Kay (a British economist and commentator):
"...and the more shareholder value became a guide to action, the worse the outcome. On the board of the Halifax Building Society, I voted in 1995 for its conversion to a “plc”. We would allow the company to pursue the goal of maximising its value untrammelled by outmoded concepts of mutuality: in barely a decade, almost every last penny of that value was destroyed."
Longevity would have been a better priority in that moment, no?
If you take someone's money, you only have a duty to fulfill your promises. Plenty of for-profit companies exist partially for some social good, or exist to further some multifaceted goals. If you can convince someone to invest in those types of goals, nothing is stopping you.
> And it's not about greed really - you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
Not an obligation, but an incentive, as preached by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling in their widely-cited 1976 paper: Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, and in a follow-up HBR article.
Reality is more nuanced. You don't, for example, really know how much profit you'll make from taking more or less investment. It comes down to strategic foresight and belief.. IE not the most reliable guess. IE, a lot depends on the personality and goals of the CEO.
In practical terms, the macro amount of money investors are trying to put in can play a much bigger role than comparing unknown futures. If investors are having trouble investing all the money they want to, the proposition gets more pleasant for the recipient. Less equity, and (more importantly irl, if not formally financial logic) better terms, less loss of control, more choice of investors.
The "fiduciary duty" that obligates companies to make money is also over somewhat academic. IRL, this doesn't really cover strategic decisions. It covers stealing, nepotism, bed-feathering and other blatant shareholder abuse. You could never prosecute a CEO for passing on investment irl.
TLDR: academics formalize these decisions in a clean, whiteboard model of the world. In the whiteboard rule, where the complexity of reality doesn't exist, choices don't really exist either. The CEO just evaluates the npv of taking investment, providing free lunch or launching a new product and the decision is made.
These companies are intentionally walking a careful line of spending a ton of money to create a market-leading product and to capture as much of the market as possible early on. They could easily be cash-flow positive and take on less investment, but it's also very possible that competing products or service providers will overtake them or become dominant in the market they are trying to establish for themselves.
So you don't want to miss out on the opportunity to be the big fish in your pond (you may be unable to keep making money in the long term if you aren't the market leader), but you don't want to grow your costs so fast that you can never catch up.
That's the balancing act being played. And your early-stage investors who have lots of control will push hard to play it aggressively in later stages, because they want to make huge returns. And when there are people out there willing to give you tens of millions of dollars and by extension several years more guaranteed life of your company without you having to do the hard work to hammer out actual profit anytime soon, it's going to be hard if not impossible to turn down.
> but it's also very possible that competing products or service providers will overtake them or become dominant in the market they are trying to establish for themselves.
It's not really possible, they are just playing the startup game. Honest non Patreon sounding justifications are pretty hard to come up with at this point.
Sometimes writing the code is, like, 10% or 20% of the work. Everything else--marketing, hiring, lead gen, legal, accounting, billing, contract negotiation, compliance, on and on--while not creative work, absolutely and disappointingly cannot be ignored.
> 99% of the work is done by antirez and the open source community
Redis Labs employs antirez and therefore sponsor the open source work on redis. At least a part of this VC money is going towards making a great open source redis. As a user, that makes me happy.
> C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.
That's the problem. Enterprising open-source stuff is really hard. Either you're selling support for already-open-source stuff, or you're selling an enterprise variant with extra goodies and throwing a support plan on top of that.
Companies suffer from Mrs. Armitage's Bike, where they're not happy with what they've got and need more. I wish more companies could just do one thing well and scale to whatever size it is that does that.
“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.”
Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.
IMHO it's important to take the quoted words into the context. And the context is:
1. Redis Labs anyway pays me full time and Fabio Nicotra (prat time) to just do BSD code. So they are not taking away anything from the OSS part.
2. Internal devs at Redis Labs submit pull requests to the Redis core BSD code base.
So this whole discussion is centered around modules, that is, their POV is that in the cloud era you have to do also things under different licenses. Now it's perfectly licit to disagree with that, however it's important to realize that Redis Labs is not taking away anything from the OSS effort around Redis, it's actually paying for such BSD code. Yet Redis Labs for some reason is getting a lot of criticisms despite other systems went completely non-open-source, core + accessory things. Something does not add up IMHO.
If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained (which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still benefits from it.
Who says that antirez can be hired "that cheaply"? Assuming he also owns equity of RedisLabs, anything short of a good exit might not be worth the oportunity cost for him.
Of course that is baseless speculation, but so is assuming that Redis could be continued to be maintained "by just hiring antirez".
> The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies
No, the problem is exactly what the source mentioned. When FOSS became a thing, cloud computing wasn't even an infant thought and the licenses that spawned during the era addressed only known factors.
> I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others
How many of them are in this situation? Not really interested in the opinions of people that don't have skin in the game, and I'd wager these people don't have product's being exploited by cloud provider.
We have large businesses exploiting open source software (thanks to dated licenses) to make profit off the back of open source communities, while contributing little-to-nothing in return.
Fuck that. I didn't adopt Redis Postgres, or MySQL so that Amazon and Google could build off decades of good will to make money from them. They've all made significant improvements to these services, but refuse to add that value back into the community despite the fact that the opportunity only existed because other's worked for free.
So it's ok for cloud providers to profit from FOSS projects, but not ok for the original authors? Shameful, this attitude is absolutely disgraceful.
Please stop using open source if you don't also advocate for FOSS authors to reserve the right to try and profit from their work in a way that's compatible with the greater FOSS community.
> According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil. Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However, in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of making software available for use by anyone.
That's a long way of saying the new license is not OSI-compliant. The new license is BSD with a common clause which according to the president of OSI, this clause instantly renders it non-approved.
I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code. There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.
Thanks coleifer, I understand that the current development path may look odd, but it's definitely not the first time: the critiques for Lua scripting or Pub/Sub where much stronger AFAIK :-) However I want to really share what is the process behind and why certain features like ACLs are so important (for reasons very different than the ones you may guess I think, that is, no enterprise customers in need for security), and why RESP3 has out-of-band data channels support (even if they are not implemented by the server). I'll write a blog post today, and reply here with the address. Cheers!
Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my comment. If I had been talking directly to you, I hope I would have written something less entitled and expressed more gratitude for the gifts you've given the community, and which you continue to improve.
Redis is exactly the kind of software that gives me joy. Aesthetically and intellectually. Its pieces are orthogonal -- a word you used in your blog post. The code is small, tight, and well designed. It invites you to think more creatively. The lolwut command was also a very good innovation!
Your comment was already great. It was the comment of somebody that cares about Redis and is closely observing what direction it is headed. Also I went through your own set of questions exactly and decided to do certain things after some consideration: it's not obvious at all if this was the right decision but at least the process can be made transparent. Thanks!
The good thing is that you have a direct line of communication with the developer himself, @antirez on this portal or GitHub. From what I know, @antirez calls the shots on what gets implemented in Redis core...NOT Redis Labs. After reading several technical/non-technical posts at http://antirez.com, I can confidently say that his decisions are always sound and justifiable! We love you @antirez!
Nice & succinct problem definition for why ACLs are so important for everyone:
> Let me show you an example. You have a Redis instance and you plan to use the instance to do a new thing: delayed jobs processing. You get a library from the internet, and it looks to work well. Now why on the earth such library, that you don’t know line by line, should be able to call “FLUSHALL” and flush away your database instantly? Maybe the library test will have such command inside and you realize it when it’s too late. Or maybe you just hired a junior developer that is keeping calling “KEYS *” on the Redis instance, while your company Redis policy is “No KEYS command”.
Without ACLs we need to rely on command renaming or completely isolating databases to guard against errors. ACLs sound complicated but they're actually a solid user experience improvement.
They're presently worth $42 billion with $2.1b in sales, 172% sales growth over three years, and are likely set to be another enterprise software juggernaut.
It clearly doesn't inherently mean anything. What matters is whether the business is growing properly versus the capital being consumed. If more capital will reasonably accelerate growth further, feed the business more capital (depending on what the owners want to pursue of course).
And I’ve recently used it for the first time, and it’s only marginally less horrible than the Oracle stuff. How does all enterprise HR software end up so horrible?
Sales people bending over to every single of their enterprise's customers demands to make a sale (and get their commission). And engineering wanting to kill themselves and just duct taping on all the nonsense sales forces on them.
It is so hard to do this because of VC money. Once you have taken the VC money success is not an option anymore. You must be super successful and ideally wipe out all competitors!
If I'd start my own startup and don't take VC money and the company makes $300k-$500k profit per year, I'd be ecstatic and happy to stay at that level forever. Maybe I'd focus more on reducing my own time spent at some point, rather than growing more.
For a VC that's the same as failing. They invest in a wide range of companies and they need to get some major cash out from the successful companies. There also needs to be an exit. That means IPO or sell the thing. The exit is needed because the fund has a set lifetime. After that the shares go to the fund investors. For years you had A16Z representing, now you got a bunch folks you never heard of. Neither you nor those people want to deal with any of that.
If you have an IPO the treadmill continues, because our economy is about exponential growth and not sustainable, steady income. That pattern is even reinforced by our tax code. Capital gains < income tax. I can defer capital gains by not selling. Don't give my dividends! Those get taxed immediately!
Reminds me of being promoted until you fail. Growing and creeping until you fail to deliver the core service you were the best at. HN skews hard to the unicorn-or-bust mentality for some reason.
What is the longterm path for things like Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic, etc? They all seem to have an open source database which they in turn monetize by offering as a DBaaS. But can they really bet against AWS in the long run?
Elastic's own cloud ElasticSearch is better than AWS's notoriously bad implementation, but what if it wasn't? Elastic's cloud offering runs on AWS and other third party offerings, so all it would take would be AWS reaching relative parity in quality, and they would then surely have the upper-hand by being the cloud infrastructure their own offering is run off of. I feel like the same is true with AWS Elasticache vs Redis Labs. What if AWS reaches parity, but can additionally offer the ease of not managing 2 accounts, as well as the ease of co-locating the cache with the app server and putting it all in a VPC. What is the endgame for these DBaaS when they have AWS copying their work?
27th, blank-or-control characters don't make good labels, plus their phonetic version may confuse investors, e.g. "Series Escape" (033) just sounds bad
Well in UTF-8 encoding that is C2AF5C5F28E38384295F2FC2AF, or 1.542e+31 rounds of funding. If they're not profitable by then, it might be time to do an acquihire or pivot to hosted memcachedb.
Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/...
I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.
There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting).
Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.
I wonder what VCs expect of Redis Labs now that they've raised a total of $146M. Let's say the VCs are shooting for a 10x return... does that mean everyone's expecting a sale/IPO for $1.5B (with revenues of maybe $25M/year)? It took RL 7+ years to get to this point, so what do investors see that I don't see?
10x return on the $60m investment means getting $600m back. Depending on ownership stake, that's probably between $2.5b and $6b after IPO. A big multiple these days is like 20x, so that's $120m - $300m in revenue.
It may take some time to get there, but they'll almost certainly break $100m. The VCs at this round probably won't sell immediately after the IPO, either -- trying to make 10x in 2 years isn't the plan.
I think their sales team is going to be in for a long, hard slog. Yes, Redis is popular right now, but the middleware space gets harder every year. Cloud providers slurp up the easy, low-hanging fruit ("click this checkbox to add a managed Redis instance to your deployment"), so all that'll be left are the big, slow, complex enterprise sales. Yeah, they pay well, but it's a brutal, competitive sales cycle, and that kind of customer often wants a lot of high-touch post-sales engineering services.
From the article: "the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development."
Redis Cloud is the very definition of a great cloud service. Cheap, easy, reliable, scalable up and down with no downtime. Can be placed in your same AWS region.
This looks like direct competition to Kafka. The technology behind Kafka Streams is solid and can probably give Kafka a run for their money (in fact Redis has more adoption than Kafka). However their product is not in the same quality range.
I didn't say it was less stable - I said that the product has less features. And I mean product in the larger sense of things - management tools,etc etc. Similar to the Confluent Platform - for the streaming usecase.
The things I like more as an "external" person given that I handle the OSS part and I'm not directly involved in the internal products development, if not as a technical advisor, are:
1. Transparent clustering. You talk to that thing like if it was a single instance and it scales to the cluster. Failover and so forth happen automatically. It'a a lot higher level than Redis Cluster (which also they support as a protocol), there are good and bad things in the different designs, but I like how well it works.
2. CRDTs store for multi master, also across far geographical area.
3. Redis on flash, using different persistent memory types. This feature originated from an early experiment I did years ago, called "diskstore", then Redis Labs worked at it many years and reached a quite cool thing.
4. All the above can be installed in your servers if you want very high memory setups that is impossible to pay for on the cloud.
5. The various modules like RedisGraph, RedisSearch and so forth are only available in the Redis Labs cloud (or you can install manually on your server). Some of those modules like RedisGraph is receiving years of development.
6. I know that the support team and everybody at Redis Labs really knows Redis. Which was one of the main reasons eventually I joined the company. So I think they are able to handle core-level issues for every user having troubles. A lot of Redis operational improvements came from Redis Labs core/support team after investigating issues with customers.
AFAIK those are the stuff I like more from the external but honestly they do a number of things I don't know very well for certain big customers.
Do you use Redis on flash by chance? I'm guessing it could help reduce reliance on more expensive memory-heavy servers (and their higher cost), but I don't hear often about real experiences with the enterprise version of Redis.
Amazon actually doesn't run the same Redis as the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if they re-wrote a lot of parts of it. They probably re-wrote the storage engine ect ...
The fact that they've done this for multiple other products built on FOSS projects is a pretty good indicator it can happen.
Aurora is a good example that's explicitly marketed that it's a different core storage engine, but they definitely make many modifications to the projects they're building on top of, but what kinds of changes really varies.
Would it still be fair to say that Redis typically is used for things like caching, messaging etc (and it's amazing for that), but not as a primary data store? Or did I miss something?
Price transparency is not optional for SAAS products. Seems to be a well kept secret on their website. Instant turn off for me. It means there are hidden costs, special deals at the discretion of some sales person, and other sales BS you have to deal with. I see this as an anti pattern for a SAAS service. We pay for lots of SAAS stuff at the company I run; we don't talk to sales people for any of that stuff ever. We engage with their support when stuff is broken. But not sales.
Redis is a great product but I fail to see the valuation that comes with a 60M investment (a billion+?). Yes, the cloud offered variety could potentially be interesting but competing products are available and this seems to be a commodity product running on commodity hardware. AWS already offers it so do others, I believe.
Yes, but not Redis open source, which has been and always will be Free Open Source Software http://antirez.com/news/120. The 'Redis' that people pay for is Redis Enterprise, or any of the cloud versions of Redis such as Redis Cloud.
> Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,” he said.
I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing are not profitable yet after years in the market and thousands of customers. C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.
Basically what happens is that even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company, so you need to scale a lot the sales team and the customer support team, so you spend more money in order to end with more customers, not caring about the short term profitability. This is common to most startups basically.
Btw the Redis Labs development team at this point is quite large, because Redis open source is the core, but the company produces a number of things in order to provide a good managed Redis experience, all the additional features and modules, and so forth. But even so, I think it is accurate to say that most money in most companies of this kind will go to orchestrate the company at a different level, not just R&D.
> even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company
I am really interested to hear how you would square this against, say, Bssecamp's modus operandi.
How would you define 'enough'?
The Basecamp model has the risk of some other company doing the same thing by taking venture capital and growing by getting more customers. At some point the economy of scale kicks in and the service get cheaper than Basecamp model.
Basecamp could have been slack, but slack ate their cake.
But Basecamp never aspired to be Slack.
They have successfully resisted the pressure to continually expand.
This is true, and, in some ways admirable.
The problem is that, for a lot of companies, the endgame is continued midsize existence; it’s death when you stop getting new customers and old ones phase out.
The low marginal cost of software doesn’t guarantee winner-take-all markets by any stretch, but it does apply pressure in that direction.
If you took VC money, 'enough' is when you cannot expect to profit from more money put into the company. (something to do with 'NPV' or net-present value, if I'm not mistaken)
And it's not about greed really - you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
> you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
A convenient myth common in the UK and US. There are no laws that require shareholders to be put first.
How many directors have been prosecuted for not maximising profit?
Yes there are no laws but I always wonder about this.
If people are serious about testing this premise, why not be upfront with the investors and actually tell them that "maximizing profit is not one of our (primary) goals"?
It strikes me as daft to pick on only that. Why's it special? Greed?
Why not be upfront with investors and tell them keeping the company viable, developing new products, finding better processes, treating staff acceptably, or maintaining the environment are not primary goals?
So why fixate on profit or shareholder value? Once you act as though it is a prime directive, you necessarily relegate the others. There are going to be a lot of times in the life of a company where growth, longevity, research or a dozen other things should take priority for a time.
By not doing so, and continuing to push the continually increasing dividend, you weaken the company. Weaker and ripe for takeover, or lacking the next generation of products that might give 20 more years of profit. Maybe by showing so much greed in your pricing that your customers give up and go elsewhere.
A long lived, vibrant, profitable company is more than just a growing dividend and share price, it's a constant balancing act of all of the above. Profit is indirectly maximised as a result of that balance.
I found a long, but very interesting discussion of the topic: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
One part is especially worth quoting, from John Kay (a British economist and commentator):
"...and the more shareholder value became a guide to action, the worse the outcome. On the board of the Halifax Building Society, I voted in 1995 for its conversion to a “plc”. We would allow the company to pursue the goal of maximising its value untrammelled by outmoded concepts of mutuality: in barely a decade, almost every last penny of that value was destroyed."
Longevity would have been a better priority in that moment, no?
If you take someone's money, you only have a duty to fulfill your promises. Plenty of for-profit companies exist partially for some social good, or exist to further some multifaceted goals. If you can convince someone to invest in those types of goals, nothing is stopping you.
> And it's not about greed really - you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
That's just formalized greed.
> And it's not about greed really - you actually have an obligation to shareholders to maximise profit.
Not an obligation, but an incentive, as preached by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling in their widely-cited 1976 paper: Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, and in a follow-up HBR article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_C._Jensen#Research
To maximize value for the VC, not profit.
In some cases value can be very different than profit, depending on your investors :
- They may want your project to have a positive impact on the local community
- They might only want to have business that are sustainable
- Maybe they care a lot about men/women equality
- Maybe they want to generate recurring revenues
- Or they are looking for short term sale
The question is: are those objectives aligned with what you want to do, or not. Most issues arise when there is a delta there.
These are very academic definition/logic.
Reality is more nuanced. You don't, for example, really know how much profit you'll make from taking more or less investment. It comes down to strategic foresight and belief.. IE not the most reliable guess. IE, a lot depends on the personality and goals of the CEO.
In practical terms, the macro amount of money investors are trying to put in can play a much bigger role than comparing unknown futures. If investors are having trouble investing all the money they want to, the proposition gets more pleasant for the recipient. Less equity, and (more importantly irl, if not formally financial logic) better terms, less loss of control, more choice of investors.
The "fiduciary duty" that obligates companies to make money is also over somewhat academic. IRL, this doesn't really cover strategic decisions. It covers stealing, nepotism, bed-feathering and other blatant shareholder abuse. You could never prosecute a CEO for passing on investment irl.
TLDR: academics formalize these decisions in a clean, whiteboard model of the world. In the whiteboard rule, where the complexity of reality doesn't exist, choices don't really exist either. The CEO just evaluates the npv of taking investment, providing free lunch or launching a new product and the decision is made.
These companies are intentionally walking a careful line of spending a ton of money to create a market-leading product and to capture as much of the market as possible early on. They could easily be cash-flow positive and take on less investment, but it's also very possible that competing products or service providers will overtake them or become dominant in the market they are trying to establish for themselves.
So you don't want to miss out on the opportunity to be the big fish in your pond (you may be unable to keep making money in the long term if you aren't the market leader), but you don't want to grow your costs so fast that you can never catch up.
That's the balancing act being played. And your early-stage investors who have lots of control will push hard to play it aggressively in later stages, because they want to make huge returns. And when there are people out there willing to give you tens of millions of dollars and by extension several years more guaranteed life of your company without you having to do the hard work to hammer out actual profit anytime soon, it's going to be hard if not impossible to turn down.
> but it's also very possible that competing products or service providers will overtake them or become dominant in the market they are trying to establish for themselves.
It's not really possible, they are just playing the startup game. Honest non Patreon sounding justifications are pretty hard to come up with at this point.
99% of the job building the core tech; the other 99% of the job is sales, support, account management, marketing, etc.
It’s never just the product, no matter how much we builder types might like.
(No idea whether 60M is the right number for the rest though.)
Sometimes writing the code is, like, 10% or 20% of the work. Everything else--marketing, hiring, lead gen, legal, accounting, billing, contract negotiation, compliance, on and on--while not creative work, absolutely and disappointingly cannot be ignored.
That adds up to 198%, but that’s effectively correct when you’re scaling up a company!
> 99% of the work is done by antirez and the open source community
Redis Labs employs antirez and therefore sponsor the open source work on redis. At least a part of this VC money is going towards making a great open source redis. As a user, that makes me happy.
https://redislabs.com/team_post_type/salvatore-sanfilippo-le...
> C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.
That's the problem. Enterprising open-source stuff is really hard. Either you're selling support for already-open-source stuff, or you're selling an enterprise variant with extra goodies and throwing a support plan on top of that.
> I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing are not profitable yet
S&M is a helluva drug. Notice something common about the "Other SG&A" in all of these?
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/mdb/financials
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/cldr/financials
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rht/financials
At the end of the day, DCF is really what matters and DCF != profit
Companies suffer from Mrs. Armitage's Bike, where they're not happy with what they've got and need more. I wish more companies could just do one thing well and scale to whatever size it is that does that.
* C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez*
Yes, but maybe he's not a business man or is not in his interest to pursue the road of something like redis labs.
That wasn't really the original commenter's point though...
Again this bullshit:
“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.”
Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.
IMHO it's important to take the quoted words into the context. And the context is:
1. Redis Labs anyway pays me full time and Fabio Nicotra (prat time) to just do BSD code. So they are not taking away anything from the OSS part.
2. Internal devs at Redis Labs submit pull requests to the Redis core BSD code base.
So this whole discussion is centered around modules, that is, their POV is that in the cloud era you have to do also things under different licenses. Now it's perfectly licit to disagree with that, however it's important to realize that Redis Labs is not taking away anything from the OSS effort around Redis, it's actually paying for such BSD code. Yet Redis Labs for some reason is getting a lot of criticisms despite other systems went completely non-open-source, core + accessory things. Something does not add up IMHO.
This is weird. I just came back from a gun rights rally in AZ, and haven't seen a single person defend the stance for gun control.
I’m not sure there’s people in the world that benefit from Redis’s stance other than Redis.
If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained (which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still benefits from it.
you know that you can have redis maintained, by just by hiring antirez? So instead of raising $60M you can just pay $500k per year.
Who says that antirez can be hired "that cheaply"? Assuming he also owns equity of RedisLabs, anything short of a good exit might not be worth the oportunity cost for him.
Of course that is baseless speculation, but so is assuming that Redis could be continued to be maintained "by just hiring antirez".
> The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies
No, the problem is exactly what the source mentioned. When FOSS became a thing, cloud computing wasn't even an infant thought and the licenses that spawned during the era addressed only known factors.
> I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others
How many of them are in this situation? Not really interested in the opinions of people that don't have skin in the game, and I'd wager these people don't have product's being exploited by cloud provider.
We have large businesses exploiting open source software (thanks to dated licenses) to make profit off the back of open source communities, while contributing little-to-nothing in return.
Fuck that. I didn't adopt Redis Postgres, or MySQL so that Amazon and Google could build off decades of good will to make money from them. They've all made significant improvements to these services, but refuse to add that value back into the community despite the fact that the opportunity only existed because other's worked for free.
So it's ok for cloud providers to profit from FOSS projects, but not ok for the original authors? Shameful, this attitude is absolutely disgraceful.
Please stop using open source if you don't also advocate for FOSS authors to reserve the right to try and profit from their work in a way that's compatible with the greater FOSS community.
From the license page: https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/
> Is Commons Clause open source?
> According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil. Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However, in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of making software available for use by anyone.
That's a long way of saying the new license is not OSI-compliant. The new license is BSD with a common clause which according to the president of OSI, this clause instantly renders it non-approved.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-comm...
I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code. There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.
Thanks coleifer, I understand that the current development path may look odd, but it's definitely not the first time: the critiques for Lua scripting or Pub/Sub where much stronger AFAIK :-) However I want to really share what is the process behind and why certain features like ACLs are so important (for reasons very different than the ones you may guess I think, that is, no enterprise customers in need for security), and why RESP3 has out-of-band data channels support (even if they are not implemented by the server). I'll write a blog post today, and reply here with the address. Cheers!
P.S. I'll also address threading and persistence.
Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my comment. If I had been talking directly to you, I hope I would have written something less entitled and expressed more gratitude for the gifts you've given the community, and which you continue to improve.
Redis is exactly the kind of software that gives me joy. Aesthetically and intellectually. Its pieces are orthogonal -- a word you used in your blog post. The code is small, tight, and well designed. It invites you to think more creatively. The lolwut command was also a very good innovation!
Your comment was already great. It was the comment of somebody that cares about Redis and is closely observing what direction it is headed. Also I went through your own set of questions exactly and decided to do certain things after some consideration: it's not obvious at all if this was the right decision but at least the process can be made transparent. Thanks!
The good thing is that you have a direct line of communication with the developer himself, @antirez on this portal or GitHub. From what I know, @antirez calls the shots on what gets implemented in Redis core...NOT Redis Labs. After reading several technical/non-technical posts at http://antirez.com, I can confidently say that his decisions are always sound and justifiable! We love you @antirez!
So nice words, thanks! I'll go ahead after this encouragement to try to reply to the OP about why I'm doing certain things.
Ok finally I wrote the post, sorry for the delay: http://antirez.com/news/126 and thanks for the feedbacks.
Nice & succinct problem definition for why ACLs are so important for everyone:
> Let me show you an example. You have a Redis instance and you plan to use the instance to do a new thing: delayed jobs processing. You get a library from the internet, and it looks to work well. Now why on the earth such library, that you don’t know line by line, should be able to call “FLUSHALL” and flush away your database instantly? Maybe the library test will have such command inside and you realize it when it’s too late. Or maybe you just hired a junior developer that is keeping calling “KEYS *” on the Redis instance, while your company Redis policy is “No KEYS command”.
Without ACLs we need to rely on command renaming or completely isolating databases to guard against errors. ACLs sound complicated but they're actually a solid user experience improvement.
Speaking to a room full of CEOs at a summit, the CEO of Chegg once said "If you are raising a series F, it means what you think it means."
What does it mean?
Tesla raised Series F in 2009, and it's still alive.
Workday also raised a series F.
They're presently worth $42 billion with $2.1b in sales, 172% sales growth over three years, and are likely set to be another enterprise software juggernaut.
It clearly doesn't inherently mean anything. What matters is whether the business is growing properly versus the capital being consumed. If more capital will reasonably accelerate growth further, feed the business more capital (depending on what the owners want to pursue of course).
And I’ve recently used it for the first time, and it’s only marginally less horrible than the Oracle stuff. How does all enterprise HR software end up so horrible?
Sales people bending over to every single of their enterprise's customers demands to make a sale (and get their commission). And engineering wanting to kill themselves and just duct taping on all the nonsense sales forces on them.
This. The only exception being if the round is measured in billions. Cf Uber, etc.
:)
Is there a break down somewhere of what each series should signify?
Starting a list:
> https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10201...
> https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/understanding-startup-...
As a customer, this is unfortunate news.
Why is it so hard to just supply an honest service in exchange for money and take a nice profit?
It is so hard to do this because of VC money. Once you have taken the VC money success is not an option anymore. You must be super successful and ideally wipe out all competitors!
If I'd start my own startup and don't take VC money and the company makes $300k-$500k profit per year, I'd be ecstatic and happy to stay at that level forever. Maybe I'd focus more on reducing my own time spent at some point, rather than growing more. For a VC that's the same as failing. They invest in a wide range of companies and they need to get some major cash out from the successful companies. There also needs to be an exit. That means IPO or sell the thing. The exit is needed because the fund has a set lifetime. After that the shares go to the fund investors. For years you had A16Z representing, now you got a bunch folks you never heard of. Neither you nor those people want to deal with any of that.
If you have an IPO the treadmill continues, because our economy is about exponential growth and not sustainable, steady income. That pattern is even reinforced by our tax code. Capital gains < income tax. I can defer capital gains by not selling. Don't give my dividends! Those get taxed immediately!
You’re getting downvoted but I too hate the world domination plans of every single successful start up.
Reminds me of being promoted until you fail. Growing and creeping until you fail to deliver the core service you were the best at. HN skews hard to the unicorn-or-bust mentality for some reason.
Probably because YC owns HN and they only make money if more people drink the VC Kool-Aid?
Hmmm. The more money companies raise, the less honesty we tend to see from them.
What is the longterm path for things like Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic, etc? They all seem to have an open source database which they in turn monetize by offering as a DBaaS. But can they really bet against AWS in the long run?
Elastic's own cloud ElasticSearch is better than AWS's notoriously bad implementation, but what if it wasn't? Elastic's cloud offering runs on AWS and other third party offerings, so all it would take would be AWS reaching relative parity in quality, and they would then surely have the upper-hand by being the cloud infrastructure their own offering is run off of. I feel like the same is true with AWS Elasticache vs Redis Labs. What if AWS reaches parity, but can additionally offer the ease of not managing 2 accounts, as well as the ease of co-locating the cache with the app server and putting it all in a VPC. What is the endgame for these DBaaS when they have AWS copying their work?
The longterm path is to relicense with https://commonsclause.com/ and prevent AWS from selling the software as a platform.
How many letters can you do? F, G, H?
The idea is to follow plain ASCII given that Redis handles strings as binary blobs. So after round Z we are going to do round [, followed by \ and ].
So Series A is already the 65th round, right?
27th, blank-or-control characters don't make good labels, plus their phonetic version may confuse investors, e.g. "Series Escape" (033) just sounds bad
Series ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well in UTF-8 encoding that is C2AF5C5F28E38384295F2FC2AF, or 1.542e+31 rounds of funding. If they're not profitable by then, it might be time to do an acquihire or pivot to hosted memcachedb.
>1.542e+31 rounds of funding
This is the funniest thing I've read all day lol. Almost reads like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley.
Loool
There was a software tools company in the 1990s that got up to Series AA. I remember thinking "please don't let this ever happen to my startup".
Wow AA round? I'm guessing the founders had no equity left after the first 10 and were just throwing money into a pit.
I wonder if this raise is to continue scaling the existing product customers/add runway or to expand its's scope to something new.
Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/...
I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.
I hoped you'd be beyond the need to be sponsored by now!
You optimist...
Yes, always, both.
There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting).
Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.
I wonder what VCs expect of Redis Labs now that they've raised a total of $146M. Let's say the VCs are shooting for a 10x return... does that mean everyone's expecting a sale/IPO for $1.5B (with revenues of maybe $25M/year)? It took RL 7+ years to get to this point, so what do investors see that I don't see?
10x return on the $60m investment means getting $600m back. Depending on ownership stake, that's probably between $2.5b and $6b after IPO. A big multiple these days is like 20x, so that's $120m - $300m in revenue.
FWIW, $25m was a pretty conservative estimate. One way to look at it is to take the number of employees and multiply by $200k. That would imply upwards of $50m in revenue. https://www.saastr.com/how-to-figure-out-your-competitors-re...
It may take some time to get there, but they'll almost certainly break $100m. The VCs at this round probably won't sell immediately after the IPO, either -- trying to make 10x in 2 years isn't the plan.
Also, 7+ years to that level isn't the worst, by any means. The more relevant metric is growth in the last couple years. If they're still doing 100%+ year-over-year, that's pretty great. https://redislabs.com/press/redis-labs-announces-10th-consec...
Great analysis, thank you.
I think their sales team is going to be in for a long, hard slog. Yes, Redis is popular right now, but the middleware space gets harder every year. Cloud providers slurp up the easy, low-hanging fruit ("click this checkbox to add a managed Redis instance to your deployment"), so all that'll be left are the big, slow, complex enterprise sales. Yeah, they pay well, but it's a brutal, competitive sales cycle, and that kind of customer often wants a lot of high-touch post-sales engineering services.
They expect 100-200m revenues per annum.
From the article: "the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development."
Redis Cloud is the very definition of a great cloud service. Cheap, easy, reliable, scalable up and down with no downtime. Can be placed in your same AWS region.
I really hope they succeed. Redis has real solid tech that has helped tens of thousands (millions?) websites scaled.
This looks like direct competition to Kafka. The technology behind Kafka Streams is solid and can probably give Kafka a run for their money (in fact Redis has more adoption than Kafka). However their product is not in the same quality range.
Hopefully this should fix it.
Surely you jest. Redis is less stable than kafka? I must have missed something.
I didn't say it was less stable - I said that the product has less features. And I mean product in the larger sense of things - management tools,etc etc. Similar to the Confluent Platform - for the streaming usecase.
what do they offer that the amazon version does not ?
The things I like more as an "external" person given that I handle the OSS part and I'm not directly involved in the internal products development, if not as a technical advisor, are:
1. Transparent clustering. You talk to that thing like if it was a single instance and it scales to the cluster. Failover and so forth happen automatically. It'a a lot higher level than Redis Cluster (which also they support as a protocol), there are good and bad things in the different designs, but I like how well it works.
2. CRDTs store for multi master, also across far geographical area.
3. Redis on flash, using different persistent memory types. This feature originated from an early experiment I did years ago, called "diskstore", then Redis Labs worked at it many years and reached a quite cool thing.
4. All the above can be installed in your servers if you want very high memory setups that is impossible to pay for on the cloud.
5. The various modules like RedisGraph, RedisSearch and so forth are only available in the Redis Labs cloud (or you can install manually on your server). Some of those modules like RedisGraph is receiving years of development.
6. I know that the support team and everybody at Redis Labs really knows Redis. Which was one of the main reasons eventually I joined the company. So I think they are able to handle core-level issues for every user having troubles. A lot of Redis operational improvements came from Redis Labs core/support team after investigating issues with customers.
AFAIK those are the stuff I like more from the external but honestly they do a number of things I don't know very well for certain big customers.
I use the Redis service. It's way less expensive. around a 90% less expensive for me. It has all of the high end features. Fault tolerance, etc.
AWS does not compete on price or performance and the Redis servers are hosted directly in whatever cloud facility you'd like.
On final note. Since setting it up, I've never had to look at it again.
Do you use Redis on flash by chance? I'm guessing it could help reduce reliance on more expensive memory-heavy servers (and their higher cost), but I don't hear often about real experiences with the enterprise version of Redis.
I use the RedisLabs SaaS. No idea how it works and I don't want to know.
Regarding the speed difference between Flash and RAM etc, it's a very interesting topic.
Free plan of 30 concurrenct connections and 30Mb of memory is pretty cool and plenty for small projects!
so now we are down-voting people for asking useful questions?
Amazon actually doesn't run the same Redis as the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if they re-wrote a lot of parts of it. They probably re-wrote the storage engine ect ...
> wouldn't be surprised
> probably
Hmm, anything of substance, or is this just pure speculation?
The fact that they've done this for multiple other products built on FOSS projects is a pretty good indicator it can happen.
Aurora is a good example that's explicitly marketed that it's a different core storage engine, but they definitely make many modifications to the projects they're building on top of, but what kinds of changes really varies.
They're certainly capable of it but I believe they would talk about and differentiate it more explicitly if they had any Aurora-like special sauce.
Would it still be fair to say that Redis typically is used for things like caching, messaging etc (and it's amazing for that), but not as a primary data store? Or did I miss something?
Does anyone know how much redis enterprise costs?
Price transparency is not optional for SAAS products. Seems to be a well kept secret on their website. Instant turn off for me. It means there are hidden costs, special deals at the discretion of some sales person, and other sales BS you have to deal with. I see this as an anti pattern for a SAAS service. We pay for lots of SAAS stuff at the company I run; we don't talk to sales people for any of that stuff ever. We engage with their support when stuff is broken. But not sales.
Redis is a great product but I fail to see the valuation that comes with a 60M investment (a billion+?). Yes, the cloud offered variety could potentially be interesting but competing products are available and this seems to be a commodity product running on commodity hardware. AWS already offers it so do others, I believe.
People pay for Redis? /s
Yes, but not Redis open source, which has been and always will be Free Open Source Software http://antirez.com/news/120. The 'Redis' that people pay for is Redis Enterprise, or any of the cloud versions of Redis such as Redis Cloud.
A wise man once said "you don't want to raise a series D and certainly nothing after that"