Likewise. Respect for antirez and all of that he is doing, but his hiring back feels like just trying to lure developers back after ridiculous move by the Redis corporation.
Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).
Nothing wrong in checking other alternatives, but Redis the company didn't call me to rejoin. I approached them to do something like an evangelist and bring back some kind of community vision inside. Then... if you can code, you end coding often times, and instead of doing the evangelist I wrote the Vector Set data type :D Just to clarify that me rejoining was not some kind of "winning back the community plan". I wrote at large about all that, even clearly stating that even the paycheck is modest (to avoid that kind of conflict of interest of the economical motivation).
I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one.
Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it?
I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games.
Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
I wonder how much of it can be blamed on the Vision Pro being nothing more than a big wobbly iPod Touch, instead of a real computer.
For me, a Vision Pro would have been fantastically useful if it was a little bit more like MacOS (or Android), and shipped with a native, real terminal that I could run things on. $3500 is suddenly a lot easier to swallow if I could think about it like 20 monitors to run terminals on.
The better analogy is that it's the Apple TV interface for your face. All the buttons are ginormous, the options are barebones, the information density is crap.
> I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to use an Apple TV for games, instead of a dedicated console. AFAICT the killer app for Apple TV is airplay. I haven't seen a co-working space conference room TV without an Apple TV attached for years.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
I refuse to use anything Apple so can't speak for the Apple TV, but I see it as pretty comparable to the Google TV (aka Chromecast w/ Google TV) products, just more open, flexible, compatible, and affordable.
I use Google TV for games on occasion. It has excellent controller support and works great for lightweight games that run fine on the stick. For anything heavier, the Steam Link app is the go-to. I can run the games on my bigass Linux PC and stream them to the TV. I routinely do this for Hogwart's Legacy for example.
Now that said, lately I've been just hooking up my Steam Deck to the TV and using that. Less friction and less bugs by avoiding the Steam Link app. And the Steam Deck is pretty close to a console (certainly much closer than it is to an Apple/Google TV), so perhaps I've just proven your point :-D
> Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers.
Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost.
> So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.
Apple probably "makes money" on each unit, but I would imagine the development costs of the Vision Pro were astronomical. With that in mind they might not even be recuperating the costs with their sizable margin.
We recently started using https://marimo.io/ as a replacement for Jupyter notebooks, as it has a number of great improvements, and this seems like a movement in a similar direction.
So many services are going this route. I remembered Reddit had an install script and almost everything worked out of the box 10-15 years ago on a Ubuntu VPS.
When I saw the new round, I was instantly worried about change in direction that will most likely come with this, and effectively drive away regular users from a tool that seems universally loved.
Similar sentiment can be seen in the discussion from three years ago [1] when they raised $100M.
When they raised the 100M three years ago, I'm pretty sure they said they didn't need it and were saving it for a rainy day (or words to that effect), always seemed very odd at the time. Two q's for anyone who cares to speculate: have they burnt the original investment already? And if not, why would they need more funding? AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today, the only thing I can conceive is that they have a secret 'tailscale 2' project in the wings which is massively developer or capital intensive. Let's hope it is nothing related to AI band wagoning :-)
Thank you. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to write “we don’t need the money but are saving for a rainy day” CEO talking points and press releases for companies that were < 90 days from not being able to make payroll.
That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%."
With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking)
And if you read the Series C post, you'd know what they're spending on - GPU (and general) cloud interconnectivity.
There's really not much need to guess, Tailscale's financing announcements are about as open as you can get.
What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.
The fine article seems to say lots of companies are using Tailscale to connect to servers with GPUs -- nothing in that implies that Tailscale would own the GPUs.
Not necessarily. You hear plenty of stories of companies who raised money they never ended up needing to touch.
What matters is why. Is it because growth is so bonkers that your burn stays minimal/zero despite increasing costs? Or is it because you don't spend anything and thus can get by with stable revenue. VCs are very happy with the first, less so with the second.
VCs would always prefer you get to megascale with less money - the less you raise, the less they get diluted.
Hm OK well thinking out loud, $100M / 3 is $33M / year?
I don't know much about Tailscale, nor about how much it costs to run a company, but I thought it was mostly a software company?
I would imagine that salaries are the main cost, and revenue could cover salaries? (seems like they have a solid model - https://tailscale.com/pricing)
I'm sure they have some cloud fees, but I thought it was mostly "control plane" and not data plane, so it should be cheap?
I could be massively misunderstanding what Tailscale is ...
You're not wrong to think Tailscale is primarily a software company, and yes, salaries are a big part of any software company's costs. But it's definitely more complex than just payroll.
A few other things:
1. Go-to-market costs
Even with Tailscale's amazing product-led growth, you eventually hit a ceiling. Scaling into enterprise means real sales and marketing spend—think field sales, events, paid acquisition, content, partnerships, etc. These aren't trivial line items.
2. Enterprise sales motion
Selling to large orgs is a different beast. Longer cycles, custom security reviews, procurement bureaucracy... it all requires dedicated teams. Those teams cost money and take time to ramp.
3. Product and infra
Though Tailscale uses a control-plane-only model (which helps with infra cost), there's still significant R&D investment. As the product footprint grows (ACLs, policy routing, audit logging, device management), you need more engineers, PMs, designers, QA, support. Growth adds complexity.
4. Strategic bets
Companies at this stage often use capital to fund moonshots (like rethinking what secure networking looks like when identity is the core primitive instead of IP addresses). I don't know how they're thinking about it, but it may mean building new standards on top of the duct-taped 1980s-era networking stack the modern Internet still runs on. It's not just product evolution, it's protocol-level reinvention. That kind of standardization and stewardship takes a lot of time and a lot of dollars.
$160M is a big number. But scaling a category-defining infrastructure company isn't cheap and it's about more than just paying engineers.
> but it may mean building new standards on top of the duct-taped 1980s-era networking stack the modern Internet still runs on.
That’s a path directly into a money burning machine that goes nowhere. This has been tried so many times by far larger companies, academics, and research labs but it never works (see all proposals for things like content address networking, etc). You either get zero adoption or you just run it on IPv4/6 anyway and you give up most of the problems.
IPv6 is still struggling to kill IPv4 20 years after support existing in operating systems and routers. That’s a protocol with a clear upside, somewhat socket compatible, and was backed by the IETF and hundreds of networking companies.
But even today it’s struggling and no company got rich on IPv6.
IPv6 has struggled in adoption not because it’s bad, but because it requires a full-stack cutover, from edge devices all the way to ISP infra. That’s a non-starter unless you’re doing greenfield deployments.
Tailscale, on the other hand, doesn’t need to wait for the Internet to upgrade. Their model sits on top of the existing stack, works through NATs, and focuses on "identity-first networking". They could evolve at the transport or app layer rather than rip and replacing at the network layer. That gives them way more flexibility to innovate without requiring global consensus.
Again, I don’t know what their specific plans are, but if they’re chasing something at that layer, it’s not crazy to think of it more like building a new abstraction on top of TCP/IP vs. trying to replace it.
Generally package is around half of what company spends per extra engineer. And $500k average for a tech heavy product company doesn't sound too far off.
When people say they get 500k they mean they get paid 200k in salary and got 300k in RSUs, with the details mixed around the edges. ICs aren't getting 500k salary except in a few rare cases.
The rule of thumb that employees actually cost a business roughly twice their salary is based on two things:
1. Retention. Hiring costs are “huge”, and so if you have a higher or lower average retention, may make up a disproportionate cost compared to salary. Ramp up time and institutional knowledge loss is no joke either.
2. A spread of average wages. 500k is not average, and a huge number of the costs are relatively fixed. $1,000 a month worth of software licensing isn’t an uncommon number and is fully 1/3 of the salary of a $3k a month or $36k/year junior clerk. It’s peanuts when you look at it next to a $500k/year salary. It may be that the clerk is, all in, costing the company 3x their salary after indemnity insurance and so on. The dev will never reach 10%.
It's really not at scale. It's on the order of 500$ a month per dev for "gold" level care for a company of 50 people. I'm sure it's less the larger you get.
It might depend on the state and the age pool but I have to pay a percentage and based on that it's more like $10k/year. So you are almost 2x undercounting
... But maybe if the average employee of a company is 25 they could get a better deal
There might be other things going on in the US that you could maybe possibly have heard about, and investors are looking for different places other than the US stock market to invest their money, and Tailscale is looking to have a war chest because of the exceedingly possible case that we're headed into a global recession.
> AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today
What does this mean? They are competing with regular legacy VPNs for sure. Despite tailscale existing for the last 4 years, none of the large corporate clients even got closed to it. They were all on junk from Cisco, Palo Alto, to connect employees to corp net. A “cutting edge” one might use cloudflare warp.
You might be right that there isn’t much competition for pure distributed, but it turns out the market for that is actually quite small and it’s for people who can’t afford dedicated IPs or cloud instances.
Raising money here is a bad sign IMO unless it’s for a completely new product that requires servers at exchanges to eat CDNs like cloudflare’s lunch.
Their is tons of competition depending on how you want to attack the problem. Tailscale's problem imho is that their product does not scale well as required by large enterprises. One could argue nor do traditional VPNs, but they are already in place and workking so that product config already works, no need for change. The market is massive, but you need to be at a high abstration layer in my opinion, so that you can replace far more than just the VPN.
There is tons of competition for Tailscale. Its 'just' an easier to use VPN with a great GTM exceution. I think they need more money as they need to fundamentally re-architect their solution to sell into enterprise use cases they their valuation requires.
No their "real" backend is proprietary. Headscale is a separate implementation that they also maintain. It's intended for self-hosting your individual Tailnet. I'm assuming if you tried to use it as a corporate VPN you would run into limitations.
Their clients for proprietary OSs are at least partly proprietary too.
To be honest I find this all a very reasonable set of compromises. It means I'm comfortable using their proprietary service without feeling like I'm getting locked into a completely closed ecosystem.
I've been tracking this space for a while just out of annoyance that Tailscale offers ssh on the free tier, then not on the "starter" paid tier. Netbird is by far the best of the alternatives that I've tried.
Well, it's important to start with saying I didn't like it as much as Tailscale, but I liked it a lot more than any of the others I tried. The UI for their dashboard is very good and getting it up and running was pretty trouble free though the docs could be a little better.
There are plenty of enterprises that will pay them to run their services and provide better integrations while allowing open source users to continue. Now people will get upset because some of these things will be for those customers only but it is very hard to keep developing these things and give them out for free. Partially open source still allows those to extend the work they give to the community and they will probably still continue to have a free tier to get more enterprise customers in the end.
This is mostly so that the founders can take some money off the table. The founders probably have $10 million cash after this and don't have to worry about rent ever again.
In organization setting this is almost useless if you are (or forced to) use some pre-made actions and/or actions that are for your organization only (they cannot be downloaded) also useless if you are forced to use self hosted runner with image that you don't have access to. Not to mention env/secrets and networking...
Given there are viable alternatives out there, I see no reason why someone should invest any time in Redis (we are using Valkey as a replacement).
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