/* Work for a Media Company */<p>We're looking to move one of our sites off Akamai mostly for costs reasons. Fastly configuration in Varnish VCL - Senior Engineers from my company highly rate Varnish as a cache software so Fastly was an easy choice.<p>I believe Akamai have been our CDN from the start. The amount of reconfiguration we'd need to do to get everything off would create a huge number of tickets in our work queue. The primary advantage of Akamai has been the number of datacenters they have to service our traffic. A customer can be in remote Australia and have their packets cached in a datacenter in the nearby telephone exchange. That's the reach of Akamai that AWS and Fastly can't compete with.<p>Their WAF and Bot detection products are also very good. They are a definitely an enterprise/full service CDN provider. I definitely wouldn't call them 'legacy' by any means but the type of service they provide is so different to a new player like Fastly.
From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar.<p>Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA?<p>Those with experience with this kind of enterprise-focused company - is this normal?
As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.)<p>Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switched. I just tested and Cloudflare is still taking 48ms their own DNS server to resolve our Cloudflare-hosted DNS, but only 14ms for Fastly to establish a connection and send the first byte.<p>That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales.<p>I think their ROI is still too low for most small businesses, the only way that actually makes sense for us is because it's free for open source/nonprofits. But I can imagine it's a big deal for larger ones.
via <a href="https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1119217911380545536" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1119217911380545536</a> interesting to see some technical detail in the S1 including a likely reference to WASM, WASI and Lucet [0].<p>"Moreover, our platform is highly technical and complex and relies on the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Potential developers may be unfamiliar or opposed to working with VCL and therefore decide to not adopt our platform, which may harm our business."<p>"We will continue to work on open source projects, which will empower developers to build applications in multiple languages, and run them faster and more securely at our edge"<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/fastly/lucet/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fastly/lucet/</a>
> We generated a net loss of $30.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2018, and as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $146.2 million.<p>Wow, I did not think an "enterprise-y" company like Fastly could be burning that much cash on growth!
The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. Cloudflare's edge KV store and edge server-side JavaScript are obvious, but great ideas.<p>The wildcard seems to be the companies that own cell towers. If they build a credible edge offering, that's a moat that is hard to beat.
Interesting that Brexit uncertainty is in their risk factors:<p>> These developments, or the perception that any of them could occur, have had and may continue to have a significant adverse effect on global economic conditions and the stability of global financial markets, and could significantly reduce global market liquidity and limit the ability of key market participants to operate in certain financial markets. In particular, it could also lead to a period of considerable uncertainty in relation to the UK financial and banking markets, as well as on the regulatory process in Europe. Asset valuations, currency exchange rates, and credit ratings may also be subject to increased market volatility.
Fastly's bandwidth prices are high to me: $0.12-$0.28/GB is 2007 rates for transit. Perhaps this is why when GitHub pages started capping bandwidth to lower limits they had also switched to Fastly? For a comparison, I pay less than $0.01/GB for a CDN right now, and the price of transit on average drops 40%/year so even that's above market rate now.<p>A lot of people (including Cloudflare) just give it out for free, making this really a space for enterprise plays, which at their size, have the clout to push for better rates across many similar competitors, or just running their own infrastructure.<p>I honestly just don't get the value add here. It really doesn't feel like an IPO play.
Where I work, a website/app in the top 20 US alexa rankings, we use Fastly and it is pretty great. If I have a complaint it's that their varnish version is old. The web UI is great, the service is great. I've never had an issue with them in my many years of working with them.
I don't use fastly on the supply side but I do use it as a consumer and the services they host that I use have good responsiveness and availability.<p>The fastly engineers I know are nice people. They take care, they're smart and afaik they've stayed small and focussed as a group. They're active in operations groups, standards.<p>What's not to love?
Is it a coincidence that there has been such a large uptick in IPOs just over 10 years after the real-estate meltdown? Or did the meltdown kill off a generation of unicorns that couldn't get funding during the crunch?<p>It's just anecdotal evidence, but I talked to a CEO that had just closed a deal with his A round from Kliner Perkins in August or September 2008. When it came time to fund the deal, the partners at the VC firm made the capital call and the LPs couldn't fund. So Kliner Perkins called the CEO and told them they had to cancel the deal.<p>The CEO had to make big cuts, couldn't pay rent on the building, etc. He eventually sold the company, but I wonder if it or others would have been IPOing around 2014-2015 if they had gotten the funding they needed.
I'm not experienced with S-1 filings, but don't they usually include the share price targeted and amount they're looking to raise? It's blank up top on the document right now. When is that typically filled in?
This guy has compiled the breakdown of equity owned by founders at IPO, of all the recent (and some historical) IPOs:<p><a href="https://grph.com/d/mzo1W9QP4Mk" rel="nofollow">https://grph.com/d/mzo1W9QP4Mk</a><p>You'd be surprised how random these appear. I guess there's no science to it, and much more chance is involved than we would like to admit.
At GitLab we use Fastly and we’ve been very happy with their service. It was fast to implement and greatly helped to speed things up. As a fellow Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) company I think it is cool that they are based on Varnish.
I haven't looked at any other details, but Googling Fastly says this:<p>"Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider. Fastly's edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services"<p>Just judging by that statement, I feel they're going to be eaten by AWS, GCP, and maybe Azure. However, it seems their focus may be on creating a viable business, rather than trying to spin an open-source project into a business (e.g., Docker Cloud). We already see that Docker is losing business to people using the OSS, but paying Amazon or Google for ECR and GCR, respectively.<p>That being said, there are some smaller somewhat related players, such as PagerDuty that seem to be off to a good start. Twilio's stock has performed well historically, too, as has Splunk. But these later companies seem to be solving problems that make them less direct competitors with the bigger players.