StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Ben Uretsky

Co-founder & Former CEO, DigitalOcean · 3 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@benuretsky ↗LinkedIn ↗digitalocean.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Ben Uretsky co-founded DigitalOcean in 2011 alongside his brother Moisey Uretsky and led the cloud infrastructure provider as CEO from inception through rapid global growth and a Techstars accelerator stint. Prior to DigitalOcean, he co-founded the managed hosting company ServerStack.

14statements → 9claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.21/5average certainty → 2.14/5average debate potential →

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 7 assertions · 3 opinions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ben argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Ben Yuretsky: DigitalOcean Is World's Fastest Growing Cloud Provider
“So, we're actually the fastest growing cloud provider on the planet today, and that's because we've built an experience that looks like nothing else that's out there.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:32 a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

222 words/min while actually speaking · 29.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ben Uretsky: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,515 words across 3 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ben Uretsky said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Ben Yuretsky: DigitalOcean Is World's Fastest Growing Cloud Provider
“So, we're actually the fastest growing cloud provider on the planet today, and that's because we've built an experience that looks like nothing else that's out there.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:32 a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uretsky: Over half of DigitalOcean's signups come from word-of-mouth recommendations
“And even to this day, over half of our customer signups come through a word of mouth recommendation, keeping our cost of acquisition really low and essentially creating a viral component to our business, which is really unheard of to think about, you know, a u…”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:57 a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need
Opinion
Uretsky: VMware's vCloud failed to gain traction due to its proprietary nature
“If we were running a VMware cloud, it wouldn't make sense to run open source, ah, on top of it, which is why I think VMware's, like, vCloud initiative hasn't necessarily hid the traction that they wanted to see.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:34 a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need
Opinion
Uretsky: Open-source community fails at user onboarding and best practices
“And one thing that the open source community hasn't really done a great job of just yet is giving you a primer and getting you started on best practice implementation from day one.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:02 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uretsky: All Major Cloud Virtualization Engines Possess Equivalent Performance
“There are two or three popular ones. And it's kind of like, you know, Silicon used to build processors. No one has a substantially faster CPU than anyone else you know, today. And the same thing happens in virtualization. Everyone's virtualization engine is, i…”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:46 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ben Uretsky: Linux containers will win over virtualization in public cloud
“Linux containers will win.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:24 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works
Opinion
Ben Uretsky: Intel will maintain its advantage over ARM in servers
“Intel. I wouldn't bet against them.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:43 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uretsky: DigitalOcean attracts 4 million monthly visitors via 1,500 developer tutorials
“So, to date, we've published 1500 tutorials that talk about how to leverage open source software. We're educating developers worldwide on how to write code, how to deploy applications, And we're drawing in four million unique visitors a month to this community…”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:55 a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need
Disclosure
Yuretsky: Banks Own the Majority of DigitalOcean's Physical Servers
“In the majority of the servers that we use, we don't own directly either, and, you know, the banks actually own those physical assets”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:51 a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership
Insight
Yuretsky: Consumers attribute product experience to platforms, not asset owners
“It's the interaction that a user has that really, ah, reigns supreme here, and that's what each one of our companies actually owns is that touch point with the user. As far as they're concerned, you know, it's DigitalOcean, it's Airbnb you know, it's local, lo…”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:13 a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership
Prediction Held up
Ben Uretsky: Flash will replace spinning disks for primary storage
“Well, flash. I think that's a no-brainer.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:12 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uretsky: The majority of software on DigitalOcean virtual machines is open source
“The virtual machines that run on our cloud the majority of the software that's loaded on them is also open source.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:59 a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yuretsky: DigitalOcean Developer Community Draws Nearly 3 Million Monthly Visitors
“And the community that we've created, it draws nearly three million, ah, visitors per month at this point.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:01 a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership
Assertion Supported
Uretsky: Global Developer Count Reaches 20 Million, Growing Millions Annually
“There are twenty million developers worldwide, ah, today, and that grows at a couple million people per year.”
Ben Uretsky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:46 a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works

Appearances (3)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need Jan 2, 2019 10m
a16z Podcast | The End of Ownership Jan 2, 2019 10m
a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works Jan 2, 2019 15m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more